Cognitive Cybersecurity {DRAFT}
Blue teaming memes
Write Access
Show me a set of beliefs, I’ll show you the outcome.
That’s a mathematical formulation of human behavior, anyways. Data comes in, the mind checks it against its expectations. If data and expectations match, great; if not, one’s gotta go. Maybe we’ll sample the data generating process more richly - upon inspection, it turns out that bird was not an alien starship. Or we’ll just act to change it outright. It’s not very exciting, but sipping water is often the single most free-energy-minimizing action when your gut neurons are reporting high dissolved solids (way more than, say, ending world hunger).
But, in what is likely news to some activists, sometimes it’s just better for your beliefs to change, not the world itself. When Neolithic Bob lands his raft on the shores of Australia and encounters a world of two thirds of the deadly animals on earth, it’s going to be much better to just up his global priors on “be really careful in this Darwinian hellscape” than to launch a hundred Emu wars or whatever.
Some beliefs are ephemeral and inconsequential. My prior on the sweetness of apples is not very significant, in the grand scheme. But many beliefs are, in fact, consequential, for the simple reason that logic. If you host belief A and belief B which are mutually exclusive, more or less each data point for which one obtains will cause the other to scream out “MODEL ERROR.” Make you uncomfy, produce a bad vibe. Some beliefs - think object permanence - obtain a *lot* of the time. If they’re going to change, a lot of downstream beliefs are coming with them.
It doesn’t really make sense to have your belief in object permanence pop in and out of your mental landscape. It’d be pretty hard for your brain to e.g. form coherent long-term strategies. So your brain gate-keeps WRITE updates to consequential beliefs pretty hard.
Capture the Flag
So your brain needs to allow updates to its foundational beliefs - the ones that more or less determine all the others => all your actions. Sometimes. When and how does it grant write access to these beliefs?
This is a *ridiculously* important question to answer. Human action is the most powerful resource on earth. If you take agents’ utility functions for granted, to get more human action for your buck you’ve got to fiddle with the arcana of optimal info sharing and game theory. Consider, as an alternative, if you could simply edit their utility function to make doing whatever it is that you want optimal. Few(er steps).
You might not be interested in editing other humans’ foundational beliefs so they spend their life serving your interests. But editing other humans’ foundational beliefs so they spend their life serving other interests is interested in you.
Chances are, you’ve got a lot of slack. As in, you’ve got a lot of disposable time, money, and energy that could be coopted away from you if certain beliefs were changed. Advertising is a mostly harmless play to absorb some of this slack - change a minor, downstream belief (“Juice cleanses are important for your health”) and the attacker gets a minor payout of time/money/energy (“I’m going to go to the juice store and buy a bunch of overpriced carrot drinks”) once the belief induces the appropriate actions (“I’ll buy $20 of juice instead of $20 of meat this week”). Even if the attacker “hacks” you in this way, it’s pretty small potatoes - they edited a small chunk of your belief landscape, and coopted only a small chunk of your slack. Nonetheless, Facebook - the cognitive cybersecurity equivalent of a “Free Wifi” router in the airport that sells access to its users on the darkweb — is a pretty big deal.
Imagine if someone could hack a foundational belief of yours, and thereby get 10000x the slack that advertisers get. That’s a lot of “Lifetime Value.”
PVP
You might be a conspiracy theorist who believes that American intelligence agencies are hard at work pursuing that holy grail. Alternatively, you might be a conspiracy theorist who believes that Chinese intelligence agencies are hard at work pursuing that holy grail.
That’s all well and good. But there’s no need - all you need is memes. Ideologies change your beliefs (unlocking your slack) and enlist you as a missionary (deploying your slack). Unlike the CCP, they have neither agency nor malicious intent - they’re simply darwinian automata, converting energy into copies of themselves. Darwinian is the key here - just as low-energy environments like subterranean caves tend to support slow-moving, humble troglodytes, older ideologies trended towards harmlessness.
If someone has to work 13 hours a day to survive and can only spend 30 minutes of free time daily on your ideology, there’s an upper limit to how mind warping it can be. If it “succeeds” too much, and the person stops working in order to dedicate all their time to the cause … and immediately starves, not necessarily good for the ideology’s long-term prospects. Parasites want their hosts to survive, and you’ll get some variation of “say a brief incantation and subtly signal your devotion with a trivial change to your clothing and diet.”
If a massive population has to work 5 hours a day, or not at all, and has oodles of energy and money to throw around, on the other hand … very different story. The friendly parasites from the olden days might survive for a little while, but it’s only a matter of time before fitter, meaner replicators emerge and wipe them out. It’s like releasing rats and cats that evolved in resource-rich jungles and plains into resource-poor islands. The memetic kakapos of our world are #NGMI.
Too bad for the memetic kakapos, you say. No, too bad for us! The new guys play for keeps, and your life is the prize.
Granted
So getting mind-hacked is bad, and there are almost certainly advanced persistent threats (APTs - human or otherwise) out there red-teaming your sanity. Back to the question - how do they win? Core beliefs probably change via neural annealing. When outside data overwhelm the brain’s ability to process them, those inadequate beliefs become labile. New ones enter, old ones leave.
Psychedelics pretty consistently induce neural annealing, and so are useful for thought experiments, but there are plenty of ways to skin a cat - “meditation, music, psychedelics, exercise, dance, sex, tantric practices, EMDR, and breath work” all qualify too. Think anything that accompanies a religious ceremony or cult initiation. Total coincidence, that. Throw enough sensory information at someone (music, exercise, dance, sex, tantra, breath work, fasting) or simply turn off their ability to process it (meditation, psychedelics, EMDR) and you’re in. Access.
To something, anyway. Almost certainly, heavy-duty psychedelics soften up lower-level beliefs than do exercise and breath work. If you need to completely hijack someone’s mind at the lowest level overnight, you’d better have access to DMT. But if you’re patient, why not simply use the weaker methods to slowly chip away, flip one tile over then another until everything the subject believes at a high level suggests your low-level payload. At that point, his brain will do the heavy lifting for you. It’s called an “A-ha moment.” As in, “a-ha, of course I should dedicate all of my resources toward this abstract goal that in no way serves my material interests.” Happens all the time.
Cults tend to use the heavy-duty stuff. Organized religions and social cliques go slow. The result is the same. You adopt their beliefs, and have some of your agency (time, energy, money, sanity) wrested from you. Rekt.
Threat Landscape
The elephant in the room is that smartphones, and most frontend interfaces generally, cause sensory overload. And not by accident! Facebook doesn’t just want your time. It wants your money. And to get that, it’s just as crucial to optimize its web app assets to properly hypnotize you with flashing bright lights and visual complexity as it is to keep you on the dopamine treadmill. When you “surf” the web, you’re signing up to have a hole (of variable depth) bored in your head, the rights to which are sold to the highest bidder.
Of course, YMMV. Video streaming probably induces more sensory overwhelm than markdown-based personal websites. Social media too. Anything that elicits strong emotions like rage, fear, lust, powerlessness … that hole is getting bored deeper. The end user is in a state of perpetual mental lability. He’s asking for you to take his agency / time / energy / money / sanity.
But this isn’t a “smartphone bad” essay. TV, newspapers, pamphlets, and posters do the job just fine - look at the 20th century. It was probably over when the printing press got invented tbh. Distribution is here to stay; what matters for us is payload. Of course, the two are related. More distribution = fiercer payloads. Dodos on the island and tigers on the mainland etc etc.
Just as economic complexity and thereby the feasibility of a mobile educated priest class pre-potentiated the dominance of lifestyle religions — ones favoring a slow drip of memes combined with constant low-level sensory overload from fasting + sexual abstinence + prayer/meditation — over local ceremonial cults circa 0 A.D., the printing press and mass literacy locked in the next paradigm. History doesn’t happen overnight, but it was only a matter of time. Static lifestyle memeplexes carefully gate-kept by a small class of clerics work well when the masses are illiterate and busy. Once you educate them, you get a Protestant revolution and then some.
In fact, protestantism - individualistic lifestyle religion of - can only be a pit stop. Once religious interpretation falls to the uninitiated, the tradition degenerates. Newton’s second law. What next?
The answer, mostly, is “whatever beliefs serve the local elite class.” Some memes are going to win, if there’s no monopolizing memeplex you get the candidates that maximize for short-term reproduction, elites produce and reproduce memes, memes that serve their hosts will be favored, voila!
So what are these elite-serving memes that are trying to slither in through the hole in my head?
Pen and Sword
Man is always ruled by either priests or warriors. Ergo, in any given modern society, lifestyle religion will generally either give way to {Evolving Assemblage of Memeplexes that Help Priests Win Against Warriors} or {Evolving Assemblage of Memeplexes that Help Warriors Win Against Priests}. Let’s call them Pen and Sword.
At first, Pen and Sword often just collapsed into “kill the warriors” and “kill the priests.” By dint of its early development, Western Europe (and by proxy America) learned that lesson earlier on in the post-enlightenment and developed more or less effective cultural antibodies against Pen- and Sword-driven violence by 1900. Central/Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America, sadly, had to develop their antibodies during the advent of mass media and mechanization. Which meant rivers and rivers of blood.
But the whole world has antibodies now, which means the crucial question of this section is - what are Pen and Sword today?
America has 2 warrior subcultures, with 2 + 1 priestly subcultures (the third priestly subculture joining a bit later in our history). Both of the warrior subcultures reside mostly in the South and have always been more marginal outside of institutions like the military (naturally) - in any case, as of the Civil War (our Sword v Pen conflict) our elite has been more or less entirely priestly. We are now a Pen country through and through.
The USSR, of course, was another Pen state. Eastern Europeans hadn’t yet developed social antibodies to memeplex-driven violence, and so priestly elites asserted dominance over the erstwhile-dominant warriors *much* more violently than they did here, but a careful observer will notice that modulo the bloodshed, Soviet Pen and American Pen are essentially one in the same. Saying that American Pen is Communism is a bit of a red herring, as it’s rather unlikely that it will ever become as bloody as did Soviet or Chinese Pen. But in all other important ways, it’s not a red herring. Human societies only vary so much, A priest is A priest is A priest and A Pen is A Pen is A Pen. American memes are American communism.
And because Pen has dominated practically the entire world since 1945, and American communism since 1998, practically all memes that we’re exposed to are Pen memes. That is, all the memeplex parasites trying to drain away our agency, energy, and time are selected to non-violently advance the interests of priests over warriors. That’s our enemy.
Unless you become a luddite, Pen memes are going to get distributed to you via smartphone hypnosis for the rest of your life. In fact, you’re already thoroughly infested with Pen memes - there’s very little you left, it’s almost all Pen brainworms. To stand a chance at decent cognitive cybersecurity, of ridding yourself of mental malware, you’ve first got to learn to recognize it.
American Communism
You probably think communism is about distributing resources. True, but that’s not its essence. Rather, Pen is about helping priests and hurting warriors. Let’s get concrete: what are priests and warriors?
Priests are, along with their namesake, academics, journalists, bureaucrats, middle management, and the rest of the so-called “Professional Managerial Class.” Warriors are, along with their namesake, artists, farmers, architects, engineers, scientists, tradesmen, technologists, founders, and executives.
Priests lead and coerce via language, whereas warriors lead via action. Priests direct, warriors push. Priests process, warriors hunt. Priests argue, warriors intuit. Priests formalize, warriors innovate. Priests value the weak and broken, warriors esteem the strong and beautiful. Priests are masochistic, warriors are sadistic. Priests want to suffer, warriors want joy.
Core priestly (warrior) beliefs include:
The strong/beautiful/successful must compensate the weak/ugly/unsuccessful for their existence. (The weak/ugly/unsuccessful must compensate the strong/beautiful/successful for their existence.)
You honor others by suffering in their name. (You honor others by accomplishing in their name.)
Words matter, actions are ephemeral. (Actions matter, words are ephemeral.)
It is selfish to pursue strength/beauty/success, it is generous to pursue purity/enlightenment. (It is selfish to pursue purity/enlightenment, it is generous to pursue strength/beauty/success.)
Concavity / Fear of Pain. (Convexity / Fear of Regret).
Desert. (Merit).
Warriors must give resources to priests. (Priests must give plaudits to warriors).
As an American with Pen brainworms, you almost certainly intuitively agree with the priestly beliefs. In fact, some of the warrior formulae may strike you as evil or even absurd (e.g. “The weak/ugly/unsuccessful must compensate the strong/beautiful/successful for their existence”).
It’s important to note that I’m not claiming that priestly beliefs are bad per se (although they certainly are dysfunctional if you’re in a warrior occupation!). Have whichever values serve you. Rather, I’m claiming that priestly beliefs form a signature by which you can recognize foreign memeplexes that are attempting to co-opt away your agency/mindspace/time/energy. Even if you’re a priest through and through, there’s a good chance you’d rather live your own priestly life than be a corpse animated by other people’s memes!
If you are a warrior by birth or calling (for instance, a tech founder), on the other hand, you probably should just tear out the whole complex root and stem. Crazy idea, I know, but belief systems that evolved in warrior subcultures tend to help with the task of doing warrior things. It’s not a coincidence that the best American tech founders have emerged from the last flickers of Sword cultures (Thiel, Musk) - communist America is entrepreneurial despite itself.
Achieving Integrity
So ambient and tech-mediated overstimulation is boring a hole into your mind, and priest-serving parasitic memeplexes are constantly being dumped in. You know how to recognize overstimulation and the parasites. Where does this leave us?
First, don’t make the problem worse - don’t expose yourself to wickedly-powerful mental parasites while mentally labile. Don’t mix {meditation, music, exercise, dance, sex, tantra, breath work, fasting, device use, emotional arousal} with {any media created after 1900 or so}.
When it comes to removing the malware that’s already completely infested your mind. It’s tricky. Returning to the mathematics of predictive processing, to kill a brainworm you need it to start generating lots of discordance and/or model error before inducing a deep annealing event. Because trapped priors happen, this probably entails internalizing a lot of warrior memes over the course of months. This may sound outlandish, but it’s basically what self-help does (rather inefficiently). Instead of relying on recovering Pen hosts, though, it’s going to be much easier to simply combine {meditation, music, exercise, dance, sex, tantra, breath work, fasting, device use, emotional arousal} with {pre-1900 Sword cultures - ancient Greeks, Japanese, Prussians}.
Continue until today’s priestly memes don’t really land anymore. IYKYK.
Happy hacking!