What is The Machine™

[Cosine 5]

Why?

People like certitude. They like security. I don't know if it's neurological, but psychologically people like to feel safe. And people feel safe when they know that they have beliefs that they can support and they know what they'll be doing tomorrow, and they know they can settle into a lifestyle and be whatever that it is that that lifestyle makes them be. I know I can't wait until I get a job and a house and a family and just settle down, because then I know I have a secure income etc.

That's part of the Machine - it plays on our need for security. This is why people work 40 hours a week, even doing things they don't like. In return for our working, the Machine gives us a sort of insurance, that is, it tells us that whatever happens, we won't starve. We will have a steady income and it shall keep us alive. One less thing to worry about, that is. And people do this because they don't have any other way to feel secure. The Machine gives them peace of mind at that level, in exchange for... slavery to the Machine?

I could rebel against employment, but if I'm unemployed, I might die.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Yes yes, security, employment, etc...

And then the economy crashes and you get laid off and can't find a new career before your saving dry up. Some great machine, huh?

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Yes yes, security, employment, etc...

And then the economy crashes and you get laid off and can't find a new career before your saving dry up. Some great machine, huh?

lol, savings.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Yes yes, security, employment, etc...

And then the economy crashes and you get laid off and can't find a new career before your saving dry up. Some great machine, huh?

lol, savings.

I am such a kidder.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Yes yes, security, employment, etc...

And then the economy crashes and you get laid off and can't find a new career before your saving dry up. Some great machine, huh?

lol, savings.

I have $2.14 in it.

[Jasper]

I don't even like the fact that they won't just let me put my money in a bucket, in the vault.  Once in a while, print a cheque for me, but other than that, gimme a federally insured vault bucket.  Savings my ass.

[Cain]

Just to be contrary, there are quite a few signs of what you guys are considering, for want of a better term, emergent conspiracy, as actually being consciously chosen by specific elite factions.

For example, modern public relations and advertising was an outgrowth of both war propaganda and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, applied by his nephew Edward Bernays.  There is a ton of evidence that the CIA and similar intelligence agencies carried out psychological warfare operations against domestic audiences, to produce certain concrete political objectives, create certain opinions and sideline others, and these operations are still being undertaken.  Game theory has been purposefully applied to the modern political scene for force people into certain zero-sum situations, the better to control them by restricting their options.

And so on and so forth.

Not everything is conscious choice, but equally not everything is serendipitous misfortune, without any agents at all making specific decisions.

[Cramulus]

There is a ton of evidence that the CIA and similar intelligence agencies carried out psychological warfare operations against domestic audiences, to produce certain concrete political objectives, create certain opinions and sideline others, and these operations are still being undertaken.  Game theory has been purposefully applied to the modern political scene for force people into certain zero-sum situations, the better to control them by restricting their options.

well that is terrifying. What keywords would I look up to learn more?

[Cain]

"Strategy of Tension" is a good start....false flag bombings designed to discredit Communist parties in Europe by linking them to terrorist violence.

There is an entire book on how the CIA and Pentagon bankrolled the vast majority of studies into communication into the 1960s, creating an obsession within the academic community on themes of power and propaganda in communication theory to the detriment of other aspects of the science (because funding was only going to towards those who studied such topics).  I'll get the name later. 

And tons of other sources as well.  Basically, despite the foreign orientation of most intelligence agencies, it is far easier to carry out psy-ops on a target population the most similar to the mentality of the agents carrying it out ie the society they come from.

[Jenne]

...is that the same time period that subliminal messages were introduced, Cain?  I vaguely remember something that I learned about subversion techniques in mass media, etc.  And inciting paranoia about subjects that were barely known amongst populations that didn't heretofore suscribe to aforementioned paranoia (like proposing new home owners build bomb shelters, etc.).  The building up of Cold War hysteria, for instance, as well.

[Cain]

I don't know much about subliminal messages and, to be honest, have always considered them to be something of a pseudoscience, based on what I do know.  But they were almost certainly tried at the time - this was the same period when the CIA was using LSD regularly and investigating various religious traditions for insights on how to manipulate populations.  They tried everything from electroshock therapy (the infamous Dr Cameron in Canada) to passing along fake information to journalists about various foreign wars, knowing they'd regurgitate it in the press and thus create the impression they wanted, and the climate of fear/suspicion which they found useful.

[Cain]

From The Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960:

Since World War II, U.S. military and NATO manuals have typically defined "psychological warfare" or "psychological operations" as tac-tics as varied as propaganda, covert operations, guerrilla warfare, and, more recently, public diplomacy. Communist theoreticians have often referred to somewhat similar activities as "agitation and propaganda" and regarded them as a component of the related, yet broader concepts known as class struggle and peoples' war. British and Nazi German strategies and tactics in the field have historically been termed "political warfare" and Weltanschauungskrieg ("worldview warfare"), respectively. Each of these conceptualizations of psychological warfare explicitly links mass communication with selective application of violence (murder, sabotage, assassination, insurrection, counterinsurrection, etc.) as a means of achieving  ideological, political, or military goals. These overlapping conceptual systems often contributed to one another's development, while retaining characteristics of the political and cultural assumptions of the social system that generated it.

Within the present context, psychological warfare can best be understood as a group of strategies and tactics designed to achieve the
ideological, political, or military objectives of the sponsoring organization (typically a government or  political movement) through exploitation of a target audience's cultural-psychological attributes and its communication system. Put another way, psychological warfare is the application of mass communication to modern social conflict: it focuses on the combined use of violence and  more conventional forms of communication to achieve politicomilitary goals.

A more complete illustration of the U.S. government's view of psy-chological warfare can be found in the definition used by the U.S. Army
in war planning during the early cold war years. The army's definition was classified as top secret at the time it was promulgated (early 1948) and remained officially secret until the late 1980s, when I obtained a collection of early psychological  warfare planning records through a Freedom of Information Act request. One of these documents reads:

Psychological warfare employs all moral and physical means, other than orthodox military operations, which tend to:

a. destroy the will and the ability of the enemy to fight.
b. deprive him of the support of his allies and neutrals.
c. increase in our own troops and allies the will to victory.

Psychological warfare employs any weapon to influence the mind of the enemy. The weapons are psychological only in the effect they produce and not because of the nature of the weapons themselves. In this light, overt (white), covert (black), and gray propaganda; subversion; sabotage; special operations; guerrilla warfare; espionage; political, cultural, economic, and racial pressures are all effective weapons. They are effective because they produce dissension, distrust, fear and hopelessness in the minds of the enemy, not because they originate in the psyche of propaganda or psychological warfare agencies.

The phrase "special operations," as  used here, is defined in a second document as:

those activities against the enemy  which are conducted by allied or friendly forces behind enemy lines.... [They] include psychological warfare (black), clandestine warfare,  subversion, sabotage, and miscellaneous operations such as assassination, target capture and rescue of downed airmen.

The army study goes on to summarize several of the tactics of persuasion just outlined, the three most basic of which are known as "white," "black," and "gray" propaganda. "White propaganda," the army states, "stress[es] simplicity, clarity and repetition." It is designed to be perceived by its audience as truthful, balanced, and factual, and the United States publicly acknowledged its promotion of this type of information through outlets such as the Voice of America. "Black" propaganda, in contrast, "stresses trouble, confusion, . . . and terror."
A variation of black propaganda tactics involves forging enemy documents and distributing them to target audiences as a means of discrediting rival powers. The U.S. government officially denies that it employs black propaganda, but in fact it has long been an integral aspect of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. "Gray"  propaganda, as its name suggests, exists somewhere between "white" and "black" and typically involves planting false information about rivals in news outlets that claim to be independent of the U.S. government.

Other U.S. Army and National Security Council documents from the same period stress three additional attributes of the U.S. psychological warfare strategy of the day: the use  of "plausible deniability" to permit the government to deny responsibility for "black" operations that were in truth originated by the United States; a conscious policy of polarizing neutral nations into either "pro-" or "anti-U.S." camps; and the
clandestine targeting of the U.S. population, in addition to that of foreign countries, for psychological operations. [/size]

U.S. military, propaganda, and intelligence agencies favored an approach to the study of mass communication that offered both an explanation of what communication "is" (at least insofar as those agencies' missions were concerned) and a box of tools for examining it. Put most simply, they saw mass communication as an instrument for persuading or dominating targeted groups. They understood "communication" as little more than a form of transmission into which virtually any type of message could be plugged (once one had mastered the appropriate techniques) to achieve ideological, political, or military goals. Academic contractors convinced their clients that scientific dissection and measurement of the constituent elements of mass communication would lead to the development of powerful new tools for social management, in somewhat the same way earlier science had paved the way for penicillin, electric lights, and the atom bomb. Federal patrons meanwhile  believed that analysis of audiences and communication effects could improve ongoing propaganda and intelligence programs.

At heart modern psychological warfare has been a tool for managing empire, not for settling conflicts in any fundamental sense. It has operated largely as a means to ensure that indigenous democratic initiatives in the Third World and Europe did not go "too far" from the standpoint of U.S. security agencies. Its primary utility has been its ability to suppress or distort unauthorized communication among subject peoples, including domestic U.S. dissenters who challenged the wisdom or morality of imperial policies. In practice modern psychological warfare and propaganda have only rarely offered "alternatives" to violence over the medium-to-long term. Instead, they have been an integral part of a strategy and culture whose premise is the rule of the strong at the expense of the weak, where coercion and manipulation pose as "communication" and close off opportunities for other, more genuine, forms of understanding. The problem with psychological warfare is not so much the content of individual messages: It is instead its consistent role as an instrument for maintaining grossly abusive social structures, notably in global North/South relations.

In time psychological warfare projects become essential to the survival of important centers of what are today regarded as mainstream mass communication studies in the United States. They were central to the professional careers of many of the men usually presented as the "founding fathers" of the field; in fact, the process of selecting and anointing founding fathers has often consisted of attributing enduring scientific value to projects that were initiated as applied studies in psychological warfare. Thus Daniel Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society—today widely recognized as the foundation of the development theory school of communication studies—is usually remembered as a politically neutral scientific enterprise. In reality, Lerner's work was conceived and carried out for the specific purpose of advancing U.S. propaganda programs in the Middle East.

[Cain]

A synopsis of the Adam Curtis documentary, The Trap:

In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought. The programme traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategised constantly. Using this as his first premise, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called "Fuck You Buddy" (later published as "So Long Sucker"), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from this game that the episode's title is taken. These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, but when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they instead chose not to betray each other, but to cooperate every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts, discredit the models, but instead proved that the secretaries were unfit subjects.

What was not known at the time was that Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and, as a result, was deeply suspicious of everyone around him—including his colleagues—and was convinced that many were involved in conspiracies against him. It was this mistaken belief that led to his view of people as a whole that formed the basis for his theories. Footage of an older and wiser Nash was shown in which he acknowledges that his paranoid views of other people at the time were false.

Curtis examines how game theory was used to create the USA's nuclear strategy during the Cold War. Because no nuclear war occurred, it was believed that game theory had been correct in dictating the creation and maintenance of a massive American nuclear arsenal—because the Soviet Union had not attacked America with its nuclear weapons, the supposed deterrent must have worked. Game theory during the Cold War is a subject Curtis examined in more detail in the To The Brink of Eternity part of his first series, Pandora's Box, and he reuses much of the same archive material in doing so.

A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate strategems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s. Reference is made to the Rosenhan experiment, in which bogus patients, surreptitiously self-presenting at a number of American psychiatric institutions, were falsely diagnosed as having mental disorders, while institutions, informed that they were to receive bogus patients, "identified" numerous supposed imposters who were actually genuine patients. The results of the experiment were a disaster for American psychiatry, because they destroyed the idea that psychiatrists were a privileged elite able to genuinely diagnose, and therefore treat, mental illness.

All these theories tended to support the beliefs of what were then fringe economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, whose economic models left no room for altruism, but depended purely on self-interest, leading to the formation of public choice theory. In an interview, the economist James M. Buchanan decries the notion of the "public interest", asking what it is and suggesting that it consists purely of the self-interest of the governing bureaucrats. Buchanan also proposes that organisations should employ managers who are motivated only by money. He describes those who are motivated by other factors—such as job satisfaction or a sense of public duty—as "zealots".

As the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public. Curtis shows that it was this belief that allowed the theories of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher, who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible—and placing former national institutions into the hands of public shareholders—a form of social equilibrium would be reached. This was a return to Nash's work, in which he proved mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a stable, yet perpetually dynamic, society could result.

The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically modelled society is run on data—performance targets, quotas, statistics—and that it is these figures combined with the exaggerated belief in human selfishness that has created "a cage" for Western humans. The precise nature of the "cage" is to be discussed in the next episode.

The programme describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the US and how New Labour in the UK decided to measure everything it could, the better to improve it, introducing such artificial and unmeasurable targets as:

    * Reduction of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 48%
    * Reduction of global conflict by 6%

It also introduced a rural community vibrancy index in order to gauge the quality of life in British villages and a birdsong index to check the apparent decline of wildlife.

In industry and the public services, this way of thinking led to a plethora of targets, quotas, and plans. It was meant to set workers free to achieve these targets in any way they chose. What these game-theory schemes did not predict was that the players, faced with impossible demands, would cheat.

Curtis describes how, in order to meet artificially inflated targets:

    * Lothian and Borders Police reclassified dozens of criminal offences as "suspicious occurrences", in order to keep them out of crime figures;
    * Some NHS hospital trusts created an unofficial post of "The Hello Nurse,"[6] whose sole task it was to greet new arrivals in order to claim for statistical purposes that the patient had been "seen," even though no treatment or even examination had occurred during the encounter;
    * NHS managers took the wheels off trolleys and reclassified them as beds, while simultaneously reclassifying corridors as wards, in order to falsify Accident & Emergency waiting times statistics.

In a section called "The Death of Social Mobility", Curtis also describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education. With league tables of school performance published, the richest parents moved house to get their children into better schools. This caused house prices in the appropriate catchment areas to rise dramatically—thus excluding poorer parents who were left with the worst-performing schools. This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society, which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of the poorest (working class) Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the average (middle class) have increased slightly and those of the highest earners (upper class) have quadrupled. Similarly, babies in poorer areas in the UK are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas.

Curtis's narration concludes with the observation that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, or psychopaths.

[LMNO]

I never really connected Nash's paranoia with the inherent selfishness of his models. 

And it's really interesting to see how that one premise colored several generations of IR.

[Cramulus]

LMNO beat me to mentioning that interesting nash/schizo connection...

I had read about the Rosenhan experiment, but not the non-existent impostor experiment.


great reading, thanks Cain