We are all subject to manipulation campaigns all the time: advertising, political campaigning, social media. You don’t know what’s true and you can’t stop watching slop.
And the technology is getting better all the time – there are now systems that predict what your brain state will be when you see a particular video on the internet.
We’re living in a jungle of manipulative media objects: sycophant chatbots, military disinformation, “flooding the zone with shit,” and conspiracy theories that either capture people and drag them into derangement or, sometimes, turn out to be true.
So where did these manipulative systems come from?
Trevor Paglen is one of the most important artists of our era. He took Richard Hames on a journey that weaves between art, technology, cognitive science, the history of CIA experiments, magic, military psy-ops and UFOs to explain why the world feels so confusing – and why that might have been the point all along.
Do Your Own Research is a show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible. The video version contains a map, which you can view in full here: https://novaramedia.com/category/video/do-your-own-research/