A Canadian intellectual, Marshall McLuhan, once said of television, "the medium is the message". I've been trying to decipher that koan for over a decade. One can say many things about it, but what McLuhan intended to say--based on his own elaboration of this phrase--is that the platform itself--the very idea of television as a means of communication, irrespective of content--would change society in ways we can't even imagine.

The idea that because we are seated, staring at a box, means we have to be somewhere a box is located: meaning inside a dwelling. Which then precludes the idea of a dynamic public setting, and human movement or noise generally. A situation which then entrains people into being silent, still and staring; rather than turning to our fellow human and dialoguing with them. And because the television was a broadcast technology owned and controlled by a cadre of corporations working directly with the government, society would be then shaped by national directives through programming, and steered into specific forms of consumer behaviors by advertising.

In retrospect, these concepts are not much of a revelation. But in McLuhan's time, this was something that induced many hundreds of hours of public discourse and rumination. Some people figured it out right away, and became book readers, eschewing the television. Others fell into the trap of 80s television sitcom culture, the decade within which "TV as Craft" (cheers, miami vice, a-team), "TV as Art" (MTV) and "TV as Mind Control" (NBC News, MTV) was ultimately perfected ('99 luftballoons', etc)

While television was first being developed commercially, Nazi scientists we imported into our intelligence research community via Operation Paperclip had us compromise our collective ethics by sexually-torturing women and drug-torturing soldiers in projects Artichoke and MKULTRA. We did this ostensibly in order to compete with the Russians, who were developing psychotronic / directed energy weaponry. Psychotronics didn't quite work out (or at least no evidence for it--like 'remote viewing' / staring at goats, for example), and so we did this because the US military intelligence is and has always been a batshit paranoid lunatic, rivaling perhaps this author.

Or maybe the faux-competition was simply the cover story for doing a type of research that would be "extremely unethical otherwise" (in quotes because no, it WAS unethical regardless), but highly profitable, in order to maintain global dominance for their corporate masters? I think by now, post 9/11, we know the true motive of those driving it, but we understand the reasoning of those fooled into giving consent for such morally repugnant programs.

Digressions asise, we do do know that they discovered that scopolamine worked because mafias in Latin America use it to mind control their target for the purposes of rape, robbery and burglary today, as burundanga. The symptoms of this type of mind control mimic many of the patsies involved in assassinations in the 60-current, including even aurora colorado james holmes mass shooting--all the patsies have the same bewildered, dissociated partial amnesia, the hallmark of scopolamine--a drug used in 'twilight sleep' with opiates to help mothers forget the pains of childbirth..

We found that LSD largely didn't work (it just fried them), or worked only in small doses. We also learned that torture works and they can create alters that are robot sex people or assassins depending on their programming. They achieved these ends using drug-altered shock torture (depatterning) and repetition (psychic driving) to 'buffer overflow' people and get to root. Then they would play films over and over again for countless hours, or repeat things like "you killed your mother". There is a fictional Michael Biehn movie and Bourne series predecessor--Timebomb--that depicts all of this horrifying depatterning and psychic driving, but you'll never see it unless someone gets and old VHS and uploads to youtube.

They don't call it 'Programming' for nothin'

Although we discovered through unethical research many forms of mind control, the Intelligence community's biggest revelation is that that the psychic driving or 'playing films over and over' was the killer app of mind kontrol. So when television was beginning to be adopted in households in the late 50s-early 60s, the MIC knew they could transfer their kontrol to this new medium as propaganda. For social control, in terms of both a cost-benefit-analysis and ease of deployment, there was no contest as to whether the television platform was the best technology. Repetition it turns out was the defining feature.

Television would then become the most widespread technology for shaping public opinion. It would receive the most funding and active development by propaganda programs.

It spreads abusive ideas that people believe, because they believe what is in that box more than their real lives. So then they make decisions based on that.

Why do people believe what comes over the box more than other people? What gives the box it's authority over the primacy of experience or that of people you know very well? Maybe it is because we now know these disturbing social psychology trends about humans.. A) They believe what they are told to believe--tv tells you what to believe B) The larger the group the stronger the belief--people know that many people have to work in order to make a TV show, and they know many others are also watching it, C) Bystander effect demonstrated among more salient variables, a 'diffusion of responsibility' which creates in the participants kind of lazy passivity in evaluating the factuality or quality of received messaging. In other words, as a bystander, one simply accepts what is given at face-value, inhibiting a mindset of 'self-starting', 'fact checking', "critical thinking" and discerning evaluation of what is received. In fact, EEG scans of people have shown that the television induces a state of mind akin to low alpha wave hypnosis.

So the MIC doesn't need to chip you, hit you with ELF/LFO or microwaves, zap you with bipverts, or send babylon matrix reality waves from the moon rebroadcast from Saturn (lookin' at you David Icke).

It just needs stunning, ample breasted, MILF-tastic news anchors to feed people a stead stream of state-approved applesauce, and in the next moment scoff at us for thinking something that contradicts their agenda. This operant conditioning of praise / faceslap is repeated in entertaining shows, repeated in internet memes, in fake news entertainment shows, then by comedians, then parrotted by people at the DMV, the most notable and obvious forms of control are unsurprisingly: FOX News shows.

Adver-spies-ments

These memes are reinforced obliquely in advertisements or in music videos; or in hidden in symbols that mock your sensibilities and make you feel bad; while reinforcing the idea that you get to be a 'part of it' if you buy their stuff. They call this identitity marketing. Now if you don't play into it and buy their stuff, then you're not only a bad person, you're not a person at all. You're not even a player; your'e not even on the court. You're just stuck in outgroup, you poor thing; wallowing in the poverty of your "not even".

And of course, never forget that all of this is done not just as an act of social control to make the government feel safe at night, it's to make money for their corporate masters. Therefore, they measure the success of their mind-control advert-inculcation by your willingness to buy products based on their programming. In other words, product and service sales are a kind of indicator of how successful their mind control is.

Thus public opinion then is the killer app and always will be. This is the true revelation of MKULTRA.

The torturing people with drugs like lsd, scopolamine, boiling water and pain, and video and repeating things to them like "you killed your mother" half a million times in their ear until they dissociate, becoming a robot alter that will do a handler's bidding---that's only an ancillary, albeit politically-useful byproduct of such nefarious research undertakings.

But you see you can't develop that easily, or deploy those forms of mind control easily. And there's huge risks of being caught, which could potentially do more damage to public opinion than simply waiting the extra time for messages to trickle in by the osmotic glare of entertainment. It's scope is limited and its cost is astronomical given the expertise, facility, time, etc.

So it's cheaper for them to just turn a few M dollars into a 24 like series and have the attractive and charismatic keifer southerland insert jingoistic military worship culture into your brain. Considering the scope and scale, it entrains many more people so the effects on society are wider if not immediately quantifiable with precision.

Internet

The television isn't the end of the story though. We have unleashed a newer medium which has a potential of reversing the monolithic Read-Only Culture Engine that is the Television by making an compelling new Read and Write and Execute environment. In other words, you can communicate on the internet. You can leave comments. You can post blog articles. You can induce others into doing the same. You can inspire others, teach them, learn from them. You can buy and sell. You can arrange real-life meetings. The internet is maybe the awesome goddamned populist upgrade the world has known.

And that is exactly why they are fighting it. They dun goof'd. And unleashed a technology that levels the playing field, offering people a TRUE equal opportunity to educate themselves.

If I wanted to learn python programming language or soapmaking, I could. If I were in Uganda and wanted to learn linux--granted I had access to a computer and some electricity maybe via solar--then I certainly could. Even without the internet, the internet could send me a laptop and a linux CD and maybe a solar panel charger. This has actually happened, it's not a hypothetical. The one laptop per child thing, actually did happen.

Going back from this digression to "the medium is the message", it applies to the internet too: we're all networked and that network itself says something. It says that McLuhan's dream of the "global village" has been fully actualized and it's more glorious than he could have predicted even in his clever mind.

But since this is a R/W/E environment, it also means that the internet is mutating our collective reality in realtime, because communication is instant and global. And because people use this information to make decisions, they then create more information on the internet, either by self-reporting their actions or having it plotted into a graph through big data reportage. This dynamic entaglement of people and information leads to a type of feedback loop which yields unusual and unforeseen social effects and real life circumstances, leading to a kind of psychedelic reality in which both opinions and subcultures morph and mutate rapidly, leading to a general feeling that "things are out of control". Ideas become these things, ideas+internet become movements.

But this very reason is why the US MIC has been focused on mass surveillance and total information awareness campaigns, in order to achieve omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence--in this case, the medium's (mass surveillance platform) message is that the US Government is scared shitless about the Internet

But that is why instead of focusing on nukes, the biggest technological front for the US Military Industrial Complex is a psychological one: they are battling hard for the the mind, the american mind. That is why there are so many sockpuppets and shills, trolls and "doubting thomases" all over reddit, shitting on your showerthought. You thought you came here to interact with a---perhaps potty-mouthed and vulgar but otherwise democratic--group of like-minded compatriots, but then you found yourself swarmed by a bunch of assholes suddenly, and then maybe ran away or got silent--because that's what they want you to do. These people aren't real, they are virtual. They might not even be people but programming a la "Agents Smith". We don't know.

Enter the Mean Girls of the MIC

But keep in mind THAT medium (PRISM, XKEYSCORE and the social media manipulation platform) is the message too, and the message of even allowing one case of government / political candidate astroturfing is a very clear message to ALL citizens:

culture is not your friend, and neither is the government.

Because a friend wouldn't create a fake persona on facebook, and then say bad things to you; or shit on your ideas publicly; or say bad things about you behind your back to influence others to dislike you and thereby discredit you. That's kind of the opposite of what a friend does.

Video may still be number 1

People spend a lot of time on Netflix and Youtube. In fact, Netflix is most of the traffic in n america. That says something. It says that whereas we may gobble on reddit or FB or Twitter, we are still talking about these shows. Their messaging still seeps in.

It also means however, that alternative media is extremely powerful. Corbett Report for example is very powerful. His 911 a conspiracy theory video is his most popular, and for a reason. It's because it lays down the facts in a clever way that puts the absurdity of the official narrative on it's head. Think about that.

We've been trying to convince people with facts, and books, and internet comments, when someone can watch a video and then have their worldview completely undone by--what is it? 5 minutes of Corbett's time?

I don't mean to plug Corbett so much. I am actually kind of mad at him, because frankly he snubbed me over questions on help for making a video of my own, couldn't even get a 'no' and not sure why not. But I think we're in the same side of this battle, so I am going to be a grown up about it and continue to endorse his stuff because it's excellent.