Weeknotes wb 16 September 2024

I have to admit that I’m struggling to maintain these weekly notes (though I will endeavour to do so). Mainly it’s that I’m over-thinking the detail and it’s taking me far too long to put the notes together. So here’s something shorter… The “Season of mists” is most definitely upon us and I’m waking to a sense of a mystery of the mornings. I love misty autumnal mornings better than any other time of the year.

On Thursday, I drove across into Essex to take my brother to buy a car. It’s the first time I’d been to that part of the country since I trained to be a school teacher there many, many decades ago. Other than the awful traffic – and even more awful drivers – the place seemed much the same. It was a sunny day and we picked his car up from a farm in the middle of the country which was idyllically peaceful. While I waited for my brother to talk with the seller, I realised how rare it is for me to experience moments of complete peace in nature.

Saturday, we took the children to the Sea Life Centre in Brighton. Got absolutely drenched by rain in the morning and then broiled by the heat in the afternoon. Brighton was BUSY and grumpy children don’t do well in situations like that. (Our children are still at that point where, once they’ve done the thing they’re interested in, they want to go home.)

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Read Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen – Saw this referenced recently and read it in one sitting. It’s a call to write: “The simple, forgettable notations of every day can offer a way into writing, transforming facts into feelings.”I’ve started reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline, a novel I’ve seen discussed a great deal lately. Surprisingly, I like her prose style. Started a book on Hegel by Charles Taylor. Still reading Nicholas Nickleby. Read 2000AD, first half of a multiverse crossover – which is ok but I much prefer the usual prog. Read Jeff Lemire’s new comic, Minor Arcana, which is wonderful.

TV has been the thoroughly enjoyable Kaos.

Listened to The Devil Runs Out, the fifth episode of Warren Ellis’ The Department of Midnight.

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Read this online earlier in the week: Society of the Psyop by Trevor Paglan. It’s the first part of a fascinating investigation into the way that mind-control techniques – particularly deception and disinformation – have been used. Paglan begins by drawing attention to the way in which the contemporary “mediascape” is directly intervening and influencing our emotional responses and thinking:

What does it mean to live in a media environment that knows our wants, needs, vulnerabilities, emotional ticks, kinks, and cognitive quirks far better than we do? That notices which kinds of stimulus induce what kinds of precognitive responses, and uses machine learning to develop, A/B test, and deploy custom-generated cognitive injections designed to manipulate us even further, all without us consciously perceiving what’s happening? And what does it mean to live in a media environment where this is all-pervasive: not only news and websites, videos and movies, but driving assistants in cars, AI-generated customer service representatives, search engines and chatbots, virtual HR managers, gas-station pumps, smart houses and phones, and even washing machines … a media landscape where your refrigerator, vibrator, and toothbrush collude with insurance companies, advertisers, political campaigns, and big retailers, using computer vision, machine learning, and biometric feedback to influence your behavior and worldview?

And:

If the postwar media landscape was characterized by spectacle, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by an age of surveillance, then we are entering a new phase. One marked by affective computing, machine learning–enabled optimization, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. A mediascape that has little use for distinctions between real and fake, signifier and signified. That assumes no distinction between perception and reality even as it attempts to intervene as directly as possible into the brains and emotional makeups of its experiencers.

The focus in this piece is the “darkside hypothesis” and Richard Doty’s use of deception and to cover up genuine military secrets using UFOs. (Doty is a former US Air Force special agent.) We get accounts of the way that Doty manufactured tailor-made deceptions for Paul Bennewitz (“The Air Force was crafting an alternate reality to feed Bennewitz’s predilections and ensure that he believed what they wanted him to believe”) and Linda Moulton Howe (convincing Howe that the US government were colluding with aliens in genetic experimentation).

Paglan refers to The 1988 edition of the US Army Field Manual which outlines ten principles of military deception (such as “The Monkey’s Paw”, “Jones’s Dilemma” and “Magruder’s Principle”) with the aim of ensuring that the intended target becomes more certain of a falsehood (rather than less certain of the truth)

Paglan is excellent in articulating why UFOs play an important role in military deception:

It turns out that US military and intelligence agencies have a long history of using UFOs as a psychological instrument, having discovered their hyper-mimetic qualities in the 1950s. Decades before Doty’s variations on the theme, UFOs were a well-known self-replicating cultural trope capable of infecting individual and cultural consciousness and spreading like a virus.

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Oh, I’m still making slow progress painting my combat patrol. I’m not sure whether my meticulous sub-assembly and (sub-)painting is worthwhile or not. We shall see.