"Targeted Individuals Under the Shadowy Control of the Influencing Machine"

From Sophia Goodfriend's 6-8-23 THE BAFFLER article entitled "Paranoid Posting: Psyops on TikTok":

Today, [Hailey] Lujan eagerly mines her ties to the covert sphere for all they are worth. She mostly portrays herself as a cute prophet capable of influencing entire populations, foremost her fans. In January, she partnered with Weapons Outfitters to release a calendar titled “The Fucking of Hearts and Minds: A Twelve-Step Operation.” The cover features Lujan in a black leather bra, holding a shotgun, and pointing suggestively toward the viewer. That same month she launched SikeOps, which markets limited-edition Lujan merchandise like Tic Tacs shaped like bullets and iron-on patches announcing, “You’ve just been fucked by psyops.”

While there are many breeds of military influencers—from National Guard recruiters to infantry lifestyle gurus—Lujan might be the only psychological operations soldier cashing in on a booming influencer market. Still, her content bears a striking similarity to prior recruitment strategies blasted by the U.S. military. In May 2022, the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion released a recruitment video titled “Ghosts in the Machine.” “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the film asks over a manicured reel of special ops forces gallivanting around the world with automatic weapons. More akin to an abbreviated psychological thriller, the film seems to promise that those who enlist will gain access to a trove of secret knowledge that will allow them to separate fact from fiction.

It may seem strange that the DoD is telling Americans to distrust all official narratives in a bid to bolster its popularity. Yet we’ve entered the age of “psyop realism,” as Günseli Yalcinkaya writes in Dazed, in which we are all “targeted individuals under the shadowy control of the Influencing Machine.” Rather than seeking alternative sources of media unmarred by government or corporate influence, more tech users seem resigned to the fact that everything they consume online is propaganda. A riff on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism,” psyop realism affirms its conditions of possibility by acceding to the ontological crisis of our post-truth era, a time where the terms of reality are interminably up for grabs. It is a condition that oozes, in the words of Jak Ritger, “a pervasive paranoia of all politics and deep distrust of authority.”

American culture has long been marked by hallmarks of psyop realism, namely rampant conspiratorialism and suspicion of political authority, with former military personnel at the vanguard of high-profile movements. Bill Kasings was a U.S. Navy Officer who worked as a technical writer for one of the rocket manufacturers for NASA’s Apollo Mission before he published the wide-reaching tract We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976. Bo Gritz, a Vietnam veteran co-founded a survivalist community and paramilitary training center, ran for vice president, and often claimed the United Nations was bringing about an apocalyptic New World Order. Korey Rowe was an infantryman in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s when he helped produce the 9/11 truther series Loose Change that went viral among veterans.

The real novelty of “psyop realism” is that the military is now proudly aggravating American conspiratorialism across social media. Perhaps this is in response to the heightened visibility of racist paranoia throughout the armed forces. FBI infiltrated far-right chat rooms and Facebook pages reveal QAnon and Great Replacement Theories swirling across bases named after Confederate generals—including Lujan’s Fort Bragg. Chronic Trumpism among the military’s ranks has some retired generals worried that the 2024 elections will yield a successful coup attempt. Sowing deep-state intrigue through official and unofficial channels, from recruiting videos to influencers, helps the military maintain its dominance over an American public.

To read the entire article, click HERE.