Mass Psychology in Geopolitics 7 of 9
Contents
Mass Psychology Manipulation: Main Power Pillar of the Empire
Acknowledgements
This work has made extensive use of the research and publications of Joshua Stylman[1] and ICE-9.[2] It is strongly recommended to study their work.
It is also strongly recommended to watch The Century of Self, a documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays.
Mass Control Platforms
From LifeLog to Facebook
Recalling that in 1917, by using newspapers only, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was able within one year to flip the majority opinion of 100 million Americans from being anti-war and neutral, to becoming pro-war and anti-German. With the advent of the internet, smart phones, social media platforms, digital cameras, face and voice recognition, coupled with orders of magnitude more powerful computing and data storage capacities and AI embedded mass psychology algorithms, mass manipulation gave way to mass control.
9/11 happened when the physical infrastructure for total mass surveillance was ready. The Patriot Act, a 342-page piece of legislation that contains more than 150 sections and amends more than 15 federal laws was passed by Congress the following month, thereby providing the legal framework necessary for mass surveillance.[3]
Shortly after passage of the Patriot Act, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in 2002.[4]
TIA collects and correlates detailed information about people. The scope of surveillance includes credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, web browsing histories, phone records, academic grades, bank deposits, gambling histories, passport applications, airline and railway tickets, driver's licenses, gun licenses, toll records, judicial records, divorce records, health and biological information, drug prescriptions, medical records, fingerprints, gait, face, and iris data, and DNA. TIA program components included:
Human identification at a distance.
Genoa for Automated Intelligence Analysis.
Genoa II for networking computers, software agents, policymakers, and field operatives.
Genisys large data collection and storage.
SSNA social network analysis.
EELD automated discovery, extraction and linking of data from multiple sources (e.g., text messages, social networking sites, financial records, and web pages).
TIDES translingual information detection, extraction, and summarization.
WAE automated technology to examine individual and group behavior.
Bio-surveillance.
Government entities involved in TIA were INSCOM, NSA, DIA, CIA, CIFA, STRATCOM, SOCOM, JFCOM, and JWAC.
Universities involved in TIA were UCal Berkeley, Colorado State, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Dallas, Georgia Tech, Maryland, MIT, and Southampton UK.
Following the launch of TIA, DARPA launched LifeLog in 2003.[5] LifeLog was to collect credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via mobile phone, and biomedical data.
Its stated objective was "to be able to trace the “threads” of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships. It has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made, and place gone."
LifeLog was subject to criticism concerning the privacy implications of the system. LifeLog was cancelled in 2004 coincidentally at the same time Facebook was launched.[6]
DARPA's Spy Tools- Before Facebook, There Was LifeLog
Qanon: Facebook Was Created By DARPA[7]
Collaboration between the intelligence community and leading computer scientists has made a comprehensive mass surveillance state possible today.[8]
Quoting ICE-9, The Killing Joke - Chapter 18 of 25 (Part II):[9]
The New Nexus was rising, and what was needed at the center intersection of that Venn Diagram was the 24/7 surveillance, censorship, and mind control “digital transformation” of an American people that soon would make nothing, yet bought everything on credit. The likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter – all birthed from their DARPA, In-Q-Tel, Project Bluebird, or some other MIC venture capital uterus
Thus, all US based ‘social media’ are effectively DARPA platforms for 24/7 surveillance, censorship, and mass psychology manipulation.
Internet Apps coupled with intelligence agencies and government data has gone much further than total mass surveillance. Chats, reactions and interactions on these platforms have enabled development of complete and continuously updated character profiles in real time, allowing mass psychology control like never before. This can be quantified by comparing man-hours involved mass psychology studies in the 1950s with current capabilities.
In 1951 a team of thirty-one University of Chicago sociologists, under the direction of Kurt Lang, took their posts along the route of the MacArthur parade in Chicago. The purpose was to note the reactions of the crowd and to compare that with what the spectators were seeing (or said they were seeing) with what they might have witnessed on television.[10] Kurt Lang received his PhD in 1953 for his research on the MacArthur Day Parade.[11]
Man-hours in this sociology experiment, including experiment design, pre-experiment meetings, actual time collecting the data, consolidating the data, and analyzing the data is estimated at more than 500 man-hours to collect and analyze less than 1,000 data points, or more than 0.5 man-hours per data point.
In 2025, to collect and analyze 1,000,000 data points on an App using automated data collection and analysis, would take less than 1 man-second. Thus 2025 data analysis and collection efficiency are over 2 billion times more than in 1951.
Recalling that in the 1950s and 1960s it was possible to effectively erase an existing culture and replace it with a controlled ‘counter culture’ with the mass media platforms of that era. Knowing now that in the 21st century, media platforms are over a billion times more powerful, then it can be understood how mass psychology has moved from mass manipulation in the 20th century to mass control in the 21st century. This is evident by the creation of Color Revolutions on Demand that the world has witnessed in the era of DARPA’s Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, Twitter etc.
It is worth noting that the academia, intelligence, media nexus discussed earlier is observed in the careers of Lang and his wife Gladys. Lang served in the Counter Intelligence Corps during WWII. After World War II, he worked in the Intelligence Branch of the US military’s Information Control Division. He later worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and taught at Queens College, Columbia University, University of California at Berkeley, Stony Brook University, and the University of Washington in Seattle. His wife Gladys Engel Lang had worked at the Office of War Information, where she produced research on the medium of radio, before moving on to the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA). In the OSS she was stationed in London, Italy, and China from 1943 until 1949 when China was liberated from colonialist presence.[12]
Data is being collected from every corner of the earth[13]
Social Media Statistics
Overview of Social Media Use[14]
Social Media Usage Statistics[15]
Social Media Audience Overlap[16]
From the above, the following can be concluded:
91% of adults in the world are internet users.
86% of adults in the world are social media users.
5.22 billion people, or 64% of the global population, are social media users.
Chinese platforms are mainly used by the Chinese.
58% of the global population use DARPA media platforms.
78% of adults outside China use DARPA media platforms.
While social media replaced TV as leading platform for mass manipulation, AI will be replacing social media as the leading instrument for manipulation. Quoting Dr. John Launchbury of DARPA: [17]
DARPA has always been on the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI), driving the technology forward’.
Already AI has been used in mass psychology operations to control the narrative in operation Covid-19. This explains the frantic race and the hundreds of billions poured in the US to achieve AI supremacy.[18] Despite these investments, the recent launchings of open source DeepSeek AI and Manus AI indicate that Chinese companies with orders of magnitude less investments, have secured the lead in AI.[19],[20] As As with the earlier ban on Huawei 5G equipment, the Empire’s response was to ban Chinese AI systems, which is already happening as DeepSeek has already been banned in the US, Italy, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan and India.[21]
Besides mass surveillance and psychological manipulation, AI can be used in thousands of applications to increase productivity; we are already using it to accelerate the mechanical design process for our testing equipment. Thus, banning lower cost, open source, superior performance systems will only act to further handicap economies in the West and further widen the technological gap between the West with China and with the RIC (Russia, Iran and China). Not surprisingly the West is increasingly being compared to the Soviet Union.
Mass Psychology Manipulation: Main Power Pillar of the Empire
Historically, the power of Empire rested on three pillars: technological, economic, and military supremacy. With the advent of neoliberalism and financialization of Western economies, technological and economic supremacy were lost and military power was eroded, as will be discussed later. The current power pillars are:[22]
1. Bretton Woods the financial and monetary construct through which wealth is siphoned from the Global South and with which economic sanctions are imposed.
2. Virtual reality, created by implementing mass psychology on DARPA platforms.
3. Military power, or what is left of it.
With the weakening of its manufacturing sector, increasing de-dollarization and the trend towards circumventing Western financial institutions in trade, the Bretton Woods construct while still powerful is weakening irreversibly.
Military power has been greatly eroded as will be discussed in part 8.
Thus the main remaining power pillar is psychological manipulation of the masses, which explains the rabid obsession with this pillar. Quoting Edward Bernays, the master of mass manipulation:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.[23]
With DARPA platforms dominant in most of the world, this manipulation has been extended from the country level to the world, hence the Color Revolutions on Demand.
Endnotes
[1] Joshua Stylman, Substack
[3] USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, US Congress, Oct 26, 2001
[4] Total Information Awareness, Wikipedia
[6] Anatomy of the Tech-Industrial Complex, Josh Stylman, Brownstone Institute, Mar 18, 2024
[7] Qanon: Facebook Was Created By DARPA, Prepare for Change
[8] Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance, Jeff Nesbitt, Quartz, Dec 8, 2017
[9] The Killing Joke - Chapter 18 of 25 (Part II), ICE-9, Substack, Mar 15, 2025
[10] The Image, a Guide to Pseudo Events in America, p212 Daniel J. Boorstin, Harper’s publishers, 1961
[11] Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, Wikipedia
[12] Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, Wikipedia
[13] The Age of Data, Hinrich Foundation, Mar 11, 2025
[14] Global Media Statistics, Datareportal, Oct 2024
[15] Global Media Statistics, Datareportal, Oct 2024
[16] Global Media Statistics, Datareportal, Oct 2024
[17] A DARPA Perspective on Artificial Intelligence, Dr. John Launchbury, Machine Learning, TechnicaCuriosa,
[18] Trump announces billions in private sector AI investment, Sareen Habeshian, AXIOS, Jan 21, 2025
[19] DeepSeek AI Launch Causes Global Tech Stock Slump: What’s Next for AI?, CEO Today, Jan 28, 2025
[20] Manus AI: The First General AI Agent, Open Sea, March 10, 2025
[21] DeepSeek Banned Countries 2025, Demand Sage, Eram Shaikh, Feb 7, 2025
[22] WHY THE WEST CAN’T WIN: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World, Fadi Lama, Clarity Press, 2023
[23] Propaganda, Edward L. Bernays, Horace Liveright Publishers, 1928
Yes, this is how it went and where humanity is today. Well done article.
Fadi, thank you. Your readers might be interested in watching the 2002 4 part video called The Century of the Self, which discusses who Edward Bernays was and when/where the mass-mind manipulation began. I watched it when it came out, and it changed my life forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s&t=1719s