Yes, The Mind Control Ray Does Exist

Why the whole world is becoming North Korea

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

—George Orwell, 1984

This going to be severely disjointed, and I’m not sure whether or not I accept this thesis myself. But I’ve been having some dark thoughts on what we’ve been seeing lately.

I was having trouble articulating this until I watched a dialogue between Cory Doctorow and Yanis Varoufakis. Doctorow and Varoufakis are some of the few genuine Leftist intellectuals still around these days.

Eventually, the subject of behavioral modification comes up, especially with respect to Big Tech. Cory Doctorow describes one of the ways in which the internet and digital media are used to control our behavior, focusing on the ownership of the means of communication:

“If you're a tech guy and you understand that people have certain activities that are non-discretionary—like being enmeshed in a community, or dealing with government services, or your employer, or if your kid is going to school and they have to use certain services—then how you use the technology does indeed modify people's behavior. You do, in fact, force people to conduct their affairs in certain ways.”

“And that is what we talk about when we talk about the risks of monopoly. Historically, the case against monopoly...has been that if the state does not regulate firms to keep them from getting too big, then the firms themselves become regulators. They get to decide who enters the market, they get to decide how people conduct their lives, and so on.”

“If the only way you're going to get broadband out in the countryside is with Elon Musk because Musk has convinced governments not to pull fiber out to low density communities...this is coming as a result of Musk wanting to control our behavior. If he's the only game in town when you want to get on to the internet—and we all have to get on the internet; that's where our bank is, and our family is, and our job is, and our kid's school is, and how we interact with politics and civics and so on—then you have to do it through Musk.”

“And so if Musk makes choices about which services are available, or which ones are prioritized and which ones are downranked, or how the service is built and whether uploads are billed at a higher rate than downloads so you can consume but not participate—that's structuring private behavior. It's a very powerful form of behavior modification.”

But then Doctorow goes on to describe another form of behavior modification using tech, and this is the one I want to focus on. Doctorow talks about the ability to manipulate and control large populations using the internet, AI, big data, and social networks:

“But there's another form of behavior modification that techbros like to claim. And it goes back to this kind of science-fictional conceit, which is that techbros take this kind of warmed-over, Skinnerian, behavior modification psychology, and they declare that they can combine it with big data and automated processes—these days they just say with AI—and that they can use that to bypass your critical faculties to make you do whatever they want.”

“And this is a very self-serving claim, especially if you’re selling ads. If your pitch to the advertisers is the reason you should pay a forty percent premium to advertise on my service is that I've built a functional mind control ray using big data, then that's a very great pitch.”

“But, you know everyone who’s ever claimed to have built a mind control ray was lying to themselves or everyone else. It was true of Rasputin, it was true of Mesmer, it was true of the CIA with MK-Ultra, it's true of pick-up artists and people who believe in neuro-linguistic programming. It's all junk.”

“Whatever behavior mod you get out of a new trick quickly regresses to the mean. The era in which 99 cents does not automatically equal a dollar is long behind us, but there was a time when you could sell something for 99 cents and they didn't realize you were selling them something for a dollar. And so these tricks regress to the mean very quickly and yet you have these claims that are quite extraordinary being made by techbros...”

One of the participants in the chat posts the following, which the host reads out:

“I get that AI and the digital cloud techniques are scary, but do we actually believe it’s something entirely new and that much more effective at modifying behavior than TV and traditional media used to be?”

To which Varoufakis replies a cryptic, “Yes, of course…” and then veers off on a completely different tangent. The topic is never returned to.

So here is my thesis. I think Doctorow is wrong. It’s not junk, or bunk. Doctorow is engaging in wishful thinking. I think 2024 will go down in history as the year the functional mind control ray was perfected and successfully deployed after years of research and development. And we’re seeing the evidence of this mind control ray everywhere around us.

That is, the ability to control and manipulate large populations is now assured. After years of trying, they have finally perfected the mind control ray and can make us believe whatever they want. Literally anything. And the 2024 US presidential campaign is evidence of that fact.

In my opinion, this is why the tech oligarchs have all enthusiastically jumped on board the MAGA bandwagon as we saw conspicuously during the inauguration. They tech elite know this is true, even if the rest of us don’t, and even if we did, we would refuse to believe it. The tech elites know that society is now putty in their hands and can be shaped and manipulated however they see fit. They know that the mind control ray exists, and that it’s in the hands of far Right. And because they know that, they want to be on the winning side. That’s what we saw on display January 20^th.

From this time forward, the far Right will dictate what everyone believes, forever. And thanks to that, the tech oligarchs will be an unassailable ruling class. Forever.

Why do I believe this? It’s important to note that the companies owned by the tech oligarchs invest incalculable billions in the latest, most cutting-edge psychological research known to man. They see reports and analyses that we will never see. They know what this tech is capable of, and none of this information will ever see the light of day. It’s as closely guarded as national secrets (and probably much better than them these days). And now they’ve seen the results with their own eyes. They saw that resistance is futile, and promptly capitulated (for example, Meta’s decision to abandon fact-checking). if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

By now I’ve seen enough videos with Trump supporters reflecting North Korean levels of delusion to suspect something is up. According to them, Trump is a genius businessman (despite bankrupting six casinos and regularly defaulting on loans). He’s scrupulously honest (despite a history of stiffing contractors and workers). He’s an upright, moral, family man (despite being best friends with Jeffrey Epstein and a convicted felon). He cares about the working class (despite being a billionaire who shits in a golden toilet). They gush about having a “strongman” leader, apparently oblivious to what that term actually means in political discourse. Recall that after the election, people searched online for “how do tariffs work?,” “can I change my vote?,” and “what is an oligarchy?”

The erosion of trust in common facts and the fracturing of our nation's ability to engage in constructive dialogue means many of us can no longer accept a shared reality. In 2023, a CNN poll found that 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believed President Biden’s 2020 win was not legitimate. That’s not surprising given new reporting that popular conservative pundits are frequently sharing election falsehoods on YouTube, which stopped moderating election-related content 18 months ago.

It can be tempting to point to fake news and misinformation as the culprit. For the past few years, my research has focused on revealing the hidden relationships between our digital lives and our psychology, and the facts we’re learning about fake news are alarming. Leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook users spent more time reading fake news than real news. Studies show that — more often than not — people believe the content they consume even when it is factually wrong. How is it possible to maintain a functioning democratic system that is based on the will of the people, if the people are falling for lies?

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/12/fake-news-is-driving-us-apart-amid-disaster--but-slanted-news-is-slowly-drowning-our-democracy/

Here are just a few of the topics which loomed large in the last election. Would any of them have been thinkable just twenty years ago?

1. Vaccines make you autistic, give young people heart attacks, or are a plot to inject microchips into you. Vaccines should be abolished.

2. Haitians in Springfield, Ohio are kidnapping people’s pets and eating them in outdoor barbecues.

3. Gangs of immigrants have taken control of American cities like Aurora, Colorado, and hordes of immigrant rape gangs are roaming the countryside coast to coast.

4. The Democrats are secretly controlling the weather and sending natural disasters to Republican-led states which voted for Trump.

5. Money for disaster relief has been diverted to immigrants instead who are given lavish “free stuff” that Americans can only dream about like affordable housing and health care.

6. Children are going off to school and coming home a different gender without their parent’s permission or consent, as if gender reassignment is an outpatient procedure that takes less time that a routine checkup or tooth cleaning.

7. And, of course, the “big lie” that Trump won the 2020 election which was secretly stolen by shadowy forces. Subsequent investigations into voter fraud did indeed find it occurred—always on the Republican side.

Surveys show a majority of Republican voters believe at least one, if not all of these things. Large numbers of the general electorate believe them, too.

It’s also why the evidence seems so at odds with what everyone believes nowadays. Surveys showed that people rated their own finances as okay, and their state’s economy as doing okay, but believed that the US was in a recession leading up to the election indicating some sort of disconnect. Surveys show that people think crime is out of control, despite statistics showing crime at much lover levels than even a decade ago. Surveys have shown that people think stuff like a quarter of the nation is transgender. They’ve also shown that people who get their information mainly from social media or podcasts are more likely to believe these things. Everywhere you look, people are buying twenty-first century magic beans—from supplements, to miracle cures, to cryptocurrency. Gambling is epidemic, and frauds and scams abound.

And you’re telling me mind control doesn’t exist?

Why are people behaving more irrationally and crazy lately? Why does everyone seem to have eccentric, oddball, and crackpot beliefs about virtually every topic these days? Is this behind the random outbursts of violence we’re seeing all over the world, and not just in the US? While the US remains the king of mass slaughter, there does seem to be an uptick of knife, gun, and auto attacks in other, usually more staid parts of the world like Germany, the UK, the Balkans, and China.

Consider some of the more bizarre recent attacks we’ve seen, from the botched Trump assassination, to the successful assassination of a health care CEO, to the detonation of a cybertruck outside Trump Tower in Las Vegas. When you read about these people’s beliefs, they seem like an odd melange of conspiracy theories and radical philosophies from across the political spectrum. The Tesla bomber, for example, was an active duty special forces soldier who was just as concerned with rising inequality as with “DEI policies.” He also claimed the government was working on “gravitric propulsion systems.” The CEO shooter’s beliefs were all over the map, from being a fan of techbros to reading the Unibomber’s manifesto.

All of them seems to have spent a great deal of time online. Maybe cognitive dissonance drove them mad? Maybe it’s driving all of us a little bit mad.

Let’s consider some of the evidence.

1. Microtargetting never want away

Remember Cambridge Analytica? That scandal seems to have completely disappeared off the radar for some reason. Yet, despite this, no one has ever proven that their methods were not effective.

Cambridge Analytica used social media and data mining to microtarget voters. The company worked for far right politicians around the world, including the Trump campaign and a number of domestic Republican campaigns. They also worked for the Conservative Party in the UK and for the Brexit referendum, among others.

The shuttering of the company in 2018 seems to have convinced people that it was all hokum, like Doctorow opines above. Yet the people behind Cambridge Analytica didn’t go away. They immediately opened a bunch of companies doing the exact same thing, working for the exact same people, except with no media scrutiny whatsoever. That’s odd. And their technology and methods have surely progressed by leaps and bounds since 2018.

A large amount of data can be extracted from the record of the trace of almost every step we take online — a digital footprint of human behavior. Whether it is our Facebook profile, Tweets, Google searches or GPS sensor, our digital footprints create extensive records of our personal habits and preferences.

CA would collect data on voters using sources such as demographics, consumer behaviour, Internet activity, and other public and private sources. According to The Guardian, CA used psychological data derived from millions of Facebook users, largely without users' permission or knowledge. Another source of information was the “Cruz Crew” mobile app that tracked physical movements and contacts and according to the Associated Press, invaded personal data more than previous presidential campaign apps.

The company claimed to use “data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques” providing “psychographic analysis” for a “deeper knowledge of the target audience”. The company used the Big Five model of personality. Using what it called “behavioral microtargeting” the company indicated that it could predict “needs” of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then could be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments and companies, providing “a better and more actionable view of their key audiences.” According to Sasha Issenberg, CA indicated that it could tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.

The “scandal” wasn’t that it didn’t work, it was that all of this data was scraped without the users’ knowledge or consent. But does that really matter now that Zuckerberg is aboard the MAGA train? And is seeing what was possible (remember, be sees reports we’ll never see) the reason for his political realignment?

Much of this technology has been created and developed by some of the most evil people on the planet. Peter Thiel’s company Palantir is named for magic seeing stones which allow evil wizards to observe everything. The company uses the internet, big data, and AI, and is extremely secretive—so much so that virtually nothing is known about it, or what it does, despite being worth billions. What, exactly, does it do? Or is it so disturbing that we can’t be told? Thiel is, of course, one of the biggest backers of the antidemocratic, theocratic, neo-fascist “New Right”, including single-handedly funding the entire political career of the current Vice president.

And let’s not forget the algorithms. A number of alt-right “pipelines” have been described by now involving the “manosphere,” health and wellness, computer games, martial arts, and so on, all powered by algorithms. Every nonpartisan, independent analysis of these algorithms shows a clear right-wing bias. And then there’s the whole constellation of podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels, narrowcasting, online intellectuals and influencers, along with an army of bots, who constantly reinforce these messages. And the few media outlets not directly under oligarch control are constantly rumored to be for sale and about to be snatched up by one of these oligarchs (e.g. TikTok, MSNBC). Musk has repeatedly attacked Wikipedia, one of the few remaining sources of public information not under right-wing control.

2. Tradecraft goes large

It’s widely known that Vladimir Putin began his career as a professional spy in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

Spies are trained in the art of turning people. This is the use of advanced psychology to get people on your side so that they will give you confidential information. This is done through a variety of manipulation techniques. For example, you might use someone’s resentment against their superiors at being passed over for promotion to get them to give you information. Grievance and resentment are powerful emotions. Some people are just greedy and feel like they deserve more money. Some people are hungry for recognition or have an innate sense of superiority. Some genuinely believe in the ideology and objectives of their opponents rather than their own side. Some might be lonely or sexually frustrated and willing to trade secrets for sex or companionship. Your job as a spy is to figure out those weaknesses so you can exploit them. It’s tradecraft 101.

But what if you could turn entire societies? In the past, of course, this was impossible. Yet with the advent of social media, it now becomes a possibility. You can micro-target messages to millions of individual citizens of a country using these same cutting-edge psychological techniques to get them on your side. Some of them are angry. Some of them are resentful. Some of them are stressed. Some of them are sexually frustrated. Some are knee-jerk contrarians and anti-establishment types. By using big data, you can tailor a personal message to each and every one of them to manipulate their personal reality to get them to believe whatever you want them to believe. Certainly this would be appealing to a former spy like Putin. And Russia invested a lot of money in this type of research during the Cold War.

The deployment of these techniques at scale is not a theoretical possibility—it has long been documented, for example, the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Election interference was proven by the Mueller Report, but a chorus of right-wing hack journalists managed to convince much of the public that is was all a lie.

Thus it goes on unabated. And given the well-documented connections between Putin’s Russia and far-right, reactionary, and neo-fascist parties all over the world—including in Europe and North America—it seems impossible to believe that they are not using these same techniques domestically. And, apparently, effectively.

3. Insurance

You might be thinking that there is no way any of this will affect me—I can think for myself! And you may be right. But it doesn’t matter, because it works on the societal level, not on the individual level, which is why it’s effective.

The parallel here is insurance. No one can say for sure if you’re going to get into a car accident tomorrow. No one can say for sure if your house is going to burn down (unless you live in LA). No one can be sure you’re going to get injured in a biking accident or come down with cancer.

But on a societal level, the reason insurance can work (or did work before climate change made it impossible to predict anything) is that we can know exactly how many people in any given population will get sick, or get into a car accident, or have their house burn down, or whatever, in a given year. No matter how unique or special you think you are, these are simply inviolable—and predictable—rules of reality at the societal level.

Political manipulation works the same way. All you have to do is manipulate enough people and you can change an entire society. Once you get enough people on your side, the rest will fall in line. The tech lords know this. It’s what their cutting-edge research tells them. Humans are social animals; we go with the herd. Social isolation means death. We look around and do what everyone else is doing. We get our opinions from those around us. We go along to get along.

The far Right knows that, in Steve Bannon’s words, “Politics is downstream from culture.” That’s why they set about to transform culture rather than just run a bunch of political campaigns like their opponents. They knew that once they succeeded in changing the culture at a fundamental level, they would win politically. And you know what? They have changed the culture. And they have won politically.

Why are younger generations becoming more conservative according to recent surveys, unlike every previous generation before them? Why is everyone suddenly finding religion and becoming tradwives? Why does everyone hate “wokeness” and feminism? Why is hereditarianism and social Darwinism all the rage? Why is the New York Times interviewing Curtis Yarvin? This all attributed to some sort of mysterious shift in “vibes,” as if it was all just somehow organic. But I don’t think that’s true. Is it a coincidence that this massive shift in “vibes” corresponds precisely with everyone becoming a smart phone zombie and social media addict around 2014?

Personally, I don’t think think so. I think it’s manipulation, and they don’t want us to know about it.

The political Left thinks if we just elect the right politician, like Bernie or AOC, then everything will be okay. But they fail to notice that the far right has captured the culture on a fundamental level. They now set the agenda. They set the terms of debate. They control the media (despite constantly claiming to be suppressed). No Leftist can get elected in such an environment, and even if they did, they could not accomplish much of significance unless the culture changed on a fundamental level. And given the far right’s iron grip on the online information ecosystem, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

You don’t have to overthrow democracy when you can determine what everyone thinks and believes without them even knowing it. You can rule forever, and it’ all 100 percent legal. It’s George Orwell on steroids, just exactly forty years later.

4. Conclusion.

So, with all due respect to Doctorow, I don’t he’s taking seriously the possibility that the mind control ray does, in fact, exist. Maybe the world really has become one giant Skinner box. Maybe they can bypass your critical faculties and make you believe whatever they want. The last time I checked, prices still ended with 99 cents.

I know that’s pretty radical, and I’m not even sure I believe it myself. I realize this sounds like just another conspiracy theory. But it sure explains a lot of what’s going on. It explains why everywhere you look, people increasingly believe absurdities and lies, and why it’s seemingly impossible to deprogram them. They think you’re the one who’s being brainwashed (as I’m sure someone will say in the comments).

A recent column in The Guardian asked for perspectives from journalists who have lived under authoritarian regimes. I thought some of their responses were telling, especially when it came to the role of the media. Here’s a reporter from the Philippines:

...the narratives of [Bongbong] Marcos and Trump have had a head-start online, spreading so exponentially and viciously that no amount of groundwork could match them. Combine with a climate of fear and you can bend anything and anyone. We’ve seen that in the Duterte, years and we expect to see it – as we are beginning to – under Trump...

We’re paying close attention to how disinformation, and the networks that sustain it, will continue to prop up the Trump administration and Trumpism. That’s the belly of the beast. Because even the worst policies can be made right in a world of manufactured realities. How should US citizens counter or address that? We need to surface real-world experiences and initiatives that illustrate good citizenship. Islands of hope.

And here’s one from Spain:

A lot of coverage about the rise of Trump and the far-right elsewhere has focused on the economy, but I wonder if we are talking enough about a huge transformation that happened in the last decade – the earthquake within our media ecosystem.

In 2016, smartphones and social media played an outsized role as compared to previous elections. That accelerated everything. The news cycle turned into a news cyclone. That helped candidates who relied on viscerality.

Since that election we’ve seen wins by populists and far-right candidates elsewhere. In Spain, the far-right Vox emerged in 2018, having previously been very fringe. Something deep has changed and perhaps the US, and UK, with Brexit, were just two early examples of what was to come. The canaries in the coal mine…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/19/trump-democracy-orban-modi-franco

Is there a better explanation? And is there an antidote? I wish I had one, but I don’t.

CODA: This speaks volumes:

[White House press secretary Karoline] Leavitt is asked what steps the White House will take to expand the types of news media that are allowed into the briefings.

"It is a fact that Americans are consuming their news media from a variety of different platforms," she says, adding that as the youngest-ever White House press secretary, she is aware that this is especially true of young Americans.

"Anybody in this country, whether you're a TikTok content creator, a blogger, a podcaster, if you you producing a legitimate news content, you will be allowed to apply for press credentials for this White House," she says.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c360k9rl1znt?post=asset%3A594c7619-a856-4a8d-8d6e-8de9e1b1f205#post

And one of the first people called on was the right-wing propaganda outlet The Daily Caller.

Without “new media” a Trump administration is impossible, and they know it. The propaganda is absolutely essential.