“The realities of using social media to induce something resembling the concept of mind control isn’t as explicit as might be initially supposed. It’s more general. You come in from the corners, not the angles. You hide the manipulations in subtle cues. And this provokes responses, not in every individual, but in a statistically derivable subgroup.

And those thus interested can use the resulting ‘factions’ like tools they can »almost direct as they will. Let’s call these population segments ‘instruments’.

The goal is to engineer instrumental populations that assist in or accomplish specific goals (tasks/functions). These result from the ‘introduction’ of formative narratives about meaning, identity and value… that invent and influence »subcultures of shared opinion, style, habit, social class or custom, and belief.

Population-bubbles. Yes/no … Us/Them paradigms. Those are at least the low-hanging fruit, and they pay vastly more dividends than studying or trying to specifically direct the mind of an individual. Nobody wants 1 person. Everyone wants 500k or 1.2 mil. So those are the targets more easily accessed.

These »associations… you can invent them, inflame them, turn them into competing factions… and that kind of thing is golden. Deep influence over individuals (though relatively accessible) is actually too granular, in an intelligence sense, to be a political or (para)military target.

One proceeds by inventing and influencing »factions. Give them a direction and some emotional momentum. When they’re locked, they’ll adopt the ‘private language’ of their faction, and you can now use that ‘framing agreement’ to direct their attention, behavior, emotions, scapegoats… and this is really just the surface of the layers that then become accessible.

And the reason this is accessible, and works…is as bizarre as it is simple: the people in the target populations are playing out habits that nothing better took advantage of. In the same way we can influence them, they absolutely want to be influenced. And cannot (yet) imagine any superior role or … directive. And are thus vulnerable to influence…”

— an intelligence agent