Deep Throat was slouched against a pillar at the north end of the underground parking lot we used to meet in. It had been over 40 years, but the vagaries of chronoportation made it seem like just yesterday that we had gathered in the detritus of the crumbling Nixon administration. When early warning signs began to surface in the folds of the incipient Trump regime—war on the press and an “enemies list”, the Attorney General firing (redolent of the Saturday Night Massacre), vindictive leaks, generalized paranoid disposition—I thought it prudent to flag DT in the usual way, by sending out a tweet I knew would meet its target: “A friend in need is worth two in the bush.”
DT evidently needed to get this stuff off his chest as quickly as I wanted to hear it. He wasted no time. I had missed his familiar nicotine rasp. “The alt-right can’t believe their luck. We’ve witnessed a comedy of errors performed by individuals who don’t realize their status as relays. Pepe was a stupid frog before Hillary, or her campaign rather, consolidated its totally uncoordinated associations into an operational white supremacist meme. All kinds of bad adjacencies came from that particular shout out. Look who’s getting press beyond their wildest dreams. The obstruction of Milo’s Berkeley thing consecrated him as a free speech advocate and hapless victim of censorship. Touching… And thanks to Time, reporting on one insignificant rally, Lügenpresse, a Nazi-era neologism is back in style. Look at it travel now. And on and on. It’s incredible. Such disproportionate attention for so little effort. The network is the intelligent agent in this story. These are people caught off guard by their sudden ascendency to power. But you better believe some of them already have a pretty sophisticated understanding of how… thought-forms gain traction. It makes me sick to admit it… but Trump was right about one thing: people don’t understand the internet. There actually have been fewer executive orders than in Obama’s first month, but everything amps up so quickly now… 8 years makes a lot of difference to a relayist. Heh.”
I mumbled something about the lack of cannily infectious alt-left memes as countermeasures, quickly summoning DT’s devastating eyeroll.
“Make your countermemes! You might get lucky. But it’s going to start to feel like a futile activity, upping the ante with no foreseeable end to it. And all that time, you’re training algorithms, fine-tuning them with every one of your contributions. Machine learning. You toss these things into the social media feedback vortex and they either intensify… stimulate other lines of pursuit, or die off when replaced by the next thing. The same tactics Anonymous used in their 4chan stage are now popping up with a distinct alt-right flavor-of-the-month. Same logics, different valencing. People are watching especially closely for how this shit territorializes. Material effects. It’s like what happens when tics escaping from the motor system’s random noise generator unexpectedly become conscious. You remember the Times a year after Shock and Awe, oh so contrite, “sorry about the cheerleading.” Retractions never cut it once the hyperstitional card has been played and effects have multiplied a thousandfold. You think sober rationality is supposed to dial it all back just like that? Heh. Christ, The Daily Show has scads of interns trawling through limitless archives to catch contradictions, and yet the President’s handlers can’t be bothered to clean up the deleterious flotsam and jetsam, like tweets expressing the exact opposites of his current positions? Or are they ordered not to? The paradigm has shifted, baby. Milo got it good though… taken down by a 16-year old girl! I’m not saying things never backfire…”
Gitanes drag. Time to get a word in. “But Trump…
“Pfft, Trump! Trump is a… surface. The first few weeks were pinging time. His handlers feed him key words to emphasize in his appearances, which are carefully scripted make no mistake, and then run some pretty sophisticated analytics to see how they play. His vocabulary is so limited it’s a default position anyway. It’s pure mètis. That’s the Ancient Greek practice of cunning intelligence. Economy of effort. Leveraging existing conditions, to achieve… wildly incommensurate effects. The Muslim ban. A gauche mess, you say? Or did they make sure it was unconstitutional, to see how much pushback would entail? In the meantime, the real game-runners are using these forms of restricted chaos to craft more meticulously duplicitous policy. They and their machines are learning. But that… meatsack in the Oval Office is ultimately uncontrollable. He’ll bury himself. Someone will get hold of his Echo feeds or something heh heh…”
“Restricted chaos?”
“Yeah. You know, fake news… disinformation, which is more accurate. There are pingers everywhere, seeing how plausible a rumor has to be to stick around long enough to jump scale. Pizzagate. These incursions are relatively short lived… and their remit is restricted. It’s mostly obfuscation, generating a sea of distracting similes that make it impossible to establish any kind of coherent position. Here’s something to pass around your circles. There’s evidence that exposure to constant low-level meaningless noise actually damages the brain’s capacity to perceive speech subtleties. A few branches have been talking about this. The researchers meant noise acoustically, you know like living next to an airport. But the expression applies. These equivocations, turnarounds, hasty maneuvers—which are perfectly crafted, I repeat—Bannon is a media whiz and don’t forget it—psyops, man… These constant disturbances are causing brain damage. The cut-up artist has to understand that.”
“You can check up on these… reports.”
“Sure, but like I said, the effect has already taken hold. It’s constantly taking hold. It’s a relatively insuperable thing. And debunking takes time, besideswhich.”
“Why not just give as good as you’re getting?”
DT shook his head. “You need something a couple steps ahead… or before. Memes, disinformation, fake news are only the surfaced edge of what I’m talking about. Meanwhile, the deep state continues to chug along. You’re not worried enough. Where are the psychoacoustic tacticians? Where is alt-DARPA in all of this? I’ll give you this: the fact that one of these pro-Trump meme campaigns was instigated and bankrolled, secretly, by a high profile individual in the virtual reality industry, which is already shall we say invested in rewiring perception, should already tell you a lot. It’s the compact between technics, the brain and control that needs your attention. The compact that intervenes before consciousness can do anything about it. Creating the right ambient conditions to rearrange all kinds of concepts. How do you make something inaudible? Now that’s a question. I don’t mean acoustically, but… psyoptically! DARPA is all over the map in terms of what they’re looking at, and they will continue to be, Republican or Democratic administrations alike. And their type of chaos is… more comprehensive. To see these Democrats openly singing the praises of the deep state—‘our brave CIA operatives’—is truly terrifying. Look at Stuxnet, for fuck’s sake! Ugh… And remember too that Watergate wasn’t about dirty tricks, it was about protecting the deep state. The people really running the show are already making inroads to it, even while they berate the agencies publically… Certain factions are keeping information from Trump now. Like I said, it’s increeeedible.”
That look of blank desolation washed over DT, the one that always surfaced after meeting with Kissinger. Change the subject.
“Did you see the Face2Face ventriloquy thing that was making the rounds a few months ago…”
“Hm! That’s more like it. At the bureau, we call it the rubicon.” He pulled out his phone. “Rubicon. ‘A limiting line that when crossed commits a person irrevocably.’ It wasn’t so long ago that people were saying you can engineer a plausibly real fake recording with consumer software that could dance around any edit detection script, but where visual duplicity is concerned, forget about it. Well we’re there. And you of course know about what they call photoshop for audio, that listens to you speak for a half-hour and then can speak anything in your voice. It can take over from you as long as you feed it a script. Another rubicon. Sound plus image. There you go. The timing… and combination… adjacency of these advances with this particular administration is kairotic… but they’re only the continuation of something deeply abiding. It gets to the point where the average person doesn’t even know what they don’t know in terms of future, or even present capabilities. You’ve got computational models that analyze Facebook “likes.” With 150, it knows you better than your partner. What about a thousand? It knows what you want before you even know it. Bannon’s big data affiliations and dark web obsessions married to a belief in immutable economic cycles worthy of fucking Kondratiev, all suggest a man willing to dissolve the state into a machinic cybernetic operation, without checks or balances. Meanwhile, Facebook—an agent actively carrying out psychological experimentation on you without your consent—wants to be… a nanny state? Oh… I’m exhausted just thinking about it. These enhancements are outpacing… have outpaced our ability to grasp their operation. These are portals. Their xeno—…”
A massive tire screech instantly turned my head. (Machinic interpellation?) In the time it took to fleetingly glimpse the tail of a vehicle careening up the exit ramp, DT had volatilized.
NEXT EPISODE: How To Build an Egregor That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.