Understanding "psyops"

Psyops.

Everything is a called a psyop now. If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably seen this word thrown around more than almost any other word lately.

What does it mean? It’s short for psychological operation, a term associated with things that FBI and CIA programs like COINTELPRO and Operation Chaos did to undermine insurgent movements in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (COINTELPRO stands for counter-intelligence program. Operation Chaos just stands for an operation designed to create chaos). They are counter-insurgency programs, and they used a wide variety of tactics to destroy insurgency movements that they thought threatened the status quo. This included misinformation, lying, psychological tactics, and a whole lot more.

But I want to focus on one example. In a 1970 FBI memo, as part of the COINTELPRO operation, they admitted to setting up a confrontation between the Black Panther Party and the US Organization. The Black Panthers are well-known, even today, as a major black nationalist group. Most people know that the FBI hated this group and tried to destroy them in various ways (which they mostly succeeded at!). The US Organization was an even more radical black nationalist group, and they were rivals of the Black Panthers. The FBI was smart enough to know that just getting the two groups in the same place would lead to conflict, most likely violence. And that’s exactly what happened. The memo about this incident outlined the FBI strategy of informing each group that the other would be on the UCLA campus at the same time, so they would show up and fight. As the memo put it:

“The Los Angeles [FBI] Division is aware of mutually hostile feelings harbored between the two organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that the US org. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP [Black Panther Party] activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”

(I found this while reading Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties). This bit of manipulation by the FBI ended up getting two Black Panther members killed in the confrontation they set up in January 1969, which led to months of retaliatory shootings, which crippled both groups. The FBI’s goal of destroying both groups was successful—and all they had to do was make sure they were in the same place at the same time.

Sidenote: You might wonder how this FBI memo, which is basically admitting to setting up a confrontation that led to murder, became public knowledge. There was a group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI that broke into an FBI field office in the early 1970s. They stole thousands of documents, and that’s how we know what we know about COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers vs US Org operation, and everything else we know about how evil the FBI was (and is). If it wasn’t for this group of brave Americans breaking into that office, we wouldn’t know any of this.

So this Panthers vs US Org conflict to me is a perfect example of how psyops work. We hear so much about mind control, and propaganda and psyops and so on in the stupid discourse of the day. People who call everything a psyop online don’t usually know what they’re saying, but there’s some sort of implication that the government or the deep state, or the FBI or CIA, or whatever, is using some kind of mechanism to poison minds, and make people do things that they wouldn’t naturally be doing, or to direct them or implant something in their mind that makes them behave in ways they normally wouldn’t. But I think the reality is much more of just opening up encounters between different types of people and letting the chaos happen. As the FBI memo about the Panthers vs US Org setup said: granting nature the opportunity to take her due course. That is the most effective way of achieving a psyop—it’s much easier than giving people false ideas (though they do that too!).

This is why social media in general has been such an effective psyop tool: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg always used to say that his company’s main value/mission was openness, making the world more open and transparent, connecting the world. (Around 2019 he switched Facebook’s mission from openness to privacy, lol). And this kind of weaponized openness is precisely what COINTELPRO was about—that’s what granting nature the opportunity to take her due course means. Today on social media we see all kinds of groups and individuals who are naturally hostile to each other, or inclined to hate each other, getting into some kind of digital proximity, and what results is destructive and beneficial to nobody except the existing power structure.

Misinformation and misdirection definitely still happen as part of the psyops that the masses are attacked with by the powers that be, but it’s way more work to change people’s minds, or conceal the truth, than to just simply have people exposed to each other who will naturally hate each other, and who are naturally inclined not to want to understand each other. (It’s definitely possible that the wave of “cancel culture” bullshit in the mid 2010s was part of a psyop to even further inflame the natural hatred that results from the radical openness and proximity of people who have nothing in common that social media creates—turning cancel culture, basically a rationalization of being hostile, into the central social value, is a great way to help turn openness into hatred).

Now, it is possible for people who don’t have anything in common to get over their differences and try to understand each other—but that takes a lot of effort, and it especially won’t happen in digital spaces and on social media, because you’re so far removed from the other person, and they don’t really seem real to you, and you can just sling the most bad faith disingenuous awful bullshit back-and-forth. It is possible even on social media to come to some sort of understanding with your enemies, but that is so rare as to be basically nonexistent.

I think at this point we know that social media communication is the lowest possible form of human interaction. It degrades absolutely everything, and so people who are from different political or cultural or social spheres, naturally inclined to not get along, will be even more inflamed than usual if they are exposed to each other in digital spaces. And of course, we’ve seen that over the last 15 years or so—it’s no accident that there’s been more openness and more connection and also more misunderstanding and conflict and hatred. Put simply: more openness has led to more hatred—this might seem surprising or counterintuitive (after all, openness sounds like this warm fuzzy positive thing!). But it’s really not surprising. The FBI has known that openness is a great way to get groups to destroy each other, going all the way back to the 1960s. It’s always been a key part of the psyop playbook—and it’s so effective because it’s so simple, takes minimal effort by the powers that be, and relies simply on, as they said in the memo I’ve quoted a few times, letting nature take its course.

So psyops aren’t so much about the specific ideology that’s being pushed by the power structure, as a lot of people think now, that critical race theory, or gender theory, or wokeness in general, or whatever, are being pushed by the FBI/CIA to infect the brains of the masses—what Elon Musk has called the woke mind virus. That stuff has been happening, and a lot of it is really stupid, but I think by and large people see through it at this point, and the bigger point is that it’s less important what people think, and more important, that people who will not ever see eye to eye, or have any common ground, are increasingly exposed to each other in digital space, to accelerate their misunderstanding and conflict.

Wokeness is added to the mix, but again the content of beliefs matters less than just the formal concern, of people having access to each other who shouldn’t. The point is that openness leads to conflict inevitably. And in general, a lot of wokeness and progressive ideology is very much about this kind of radical openness, trying to reach common ground with people who are your enemy.

It should be noted, although it’s kind of obvious, that the whole point of COINTELPRO when it was created was to heighten factionalism among the Left. This means getting different little segments of the Left to hate each other—which naturally happens, of course, since Leftists love fighting with each other (they always have!). But the psyops were about accelerating these fights, and making them happen faster, more often, and more viciously than they otherwise would. Again: it’s all about using natural antipathy that Leftists have, and giving it more momentum. Clearly, the Left (if one even exists now, which I think is very much in doubt), is more factionalized, fragmented, broken up, and in a word fucked than maybe ever.

And in talking about social media/digital spaces being used as a tool for psyops, we should ask: where does the Internet come from anyway? It’s not a mystery: it comes from something called The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was a project by the Defense Department to create weapons that would keep the United States out ahead of its enemies. DARPA pioneered the Internet, and so it’s no surprise that DARPA, which has a lot of overlap with other shadowy programs, creates inventions that are used to help psyop the American public. The Internet is not some mysterious magical gift from above that was bestowed upon us by nice geniuses—it comes from similar places as COINTELPRO. It can be used for some good things (the Arab Spring in 2011 has a complicated legacy but achieved some good things, and social media played a big role in its success). But by and large, social media, which is all about radical openness, has been used by the powers that be, to further their ends. There’s never been a better tool for granting nature the opportunity to take its due course—and efficiently create chaos.