Negotiating the Contested Psychological Territories of Cyber Warfare
Christopher Wylie is the coder who created the algorithm that made Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ psychographic profiling firms (the IP of both being owned by Robert Mercer) capable of mutating the national souls of two Western democracies by mining and weaponizing Facebook personal data hoards. Cyberspace is so new, we haven’t adapted. We can’t parse it. It eludes, and elides, our multi-million-years-old sensorium and ability to formulate a rational analysis of benefit or threat. This is a test.
As a species — as a story-telling, narrative-constructing kind of animal, collectively — we, as a whole, as a group, are woefully ill-equipped to parse and process military psi-ops perpetrated against us by ‘bad actors.’ Even less so can we perceive the vast, virtual territories contested in cyber-wars commissioned by aggressively tyrannical regimes or corporate marketing. We subscribe to the fictive meta-narratives contrived by our cyber- ‘handlers’ to capture our attention, if not our credulity, in a manner more magico-religious than consumer-savvy.
This is why U.S. intelligence agencies have so successfully been deploying psychographic methods (‘military psi-ops’) in third world countries and unstable nations they want to ‘convert’ for decades, and why ultra-right wing agents (Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Kushner and Parsdale on behalf of the stupid ignorant Trump, their vessel, who himself, personally doesn’t even go online except to Tweet — doesn’t even do email, doesn’t know how) so successfully deployed military psi-ops against the domestic civilian populations of the U.S. and the U.K. (for the first time ever), leading up to the Brexit and Trump victories. Like shooting fish in a barrel.
We (collectively) can’t perceive the threats or benefits as clearly as, say, we may assess the threats or advantages of a lightning storm as opposed to a mild rain. Yet cyberspace is a virtual landscape we more and more inhabit. Like the magical landscape of shamans or journeyers in spirit, the landmarks, cyber-features, peaks, valleys and sink-holes must be discerned for safe passage.
In the traditional magical landscape of Eurasian shaman stories and wonder tales, the beautiful ‘silk meadow’ is a terrain inhabited by demons. Its languid, waving movement lulls the senses and conceals the lurking supernatural threat and malign ill will hiding under the surface. Much of cyberspace is the same.
