Illustration expressing the human brain controlled by external factors. File photo.
By Raúl Antonio Capote – Jan 10, 2025
The nature of warfare has changed radically. This may seem too categorical a statement, but it is a reality defined by the nature of today’s conflicts, shaped by the dizzying evolution of the technological revolution.
Military Information Support Operations (MISO), aimed at influencing “enemy” audiences, their emotions, behaviors and motivations, are part of this way of conducting conflict. The term, defined by the Pentagon, replaced PSYOP (Psychological Operation) in 2010, which had been used since World War II.
According to the document Warfighting 2040, Cognitive Warfare (CW) “is based on the use of disinformation and propaganda techniques designed to psychologically exhaust the recipients of information.”
However, the possibilities of this type of warfare are expanding every day with the advancement of information and disinformation techniques, but especially with the advancement of NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science).
It is no longer a matter of dominating the five main scenarios of conventional or unconventional warfare (air, land, sea, space, and cyber); now the confrontation is also taking place in the human domain, so that victory will depend on the ability to impose a desired behavior on a selected audience.
The digital environment makes it possible to coordinate dispersed people and organize attack swarms with the mission of sowing uncertainty, despair, fear, anxiety and chaos.
By mastering artificial intelligence (AI), analysts can build models capable of predicting hidden attributes, including political preferences, sexual orientation, and more.
The social networks and applications we use leave hundreds of thousands of footprints that big data companies use to build user profiles and organize interest groups.
Information warfare (IW) is often confused with cyber warfare (CW), because of its close relationship; however, IW aims to control the flow of information, while cognitive encompasses all the sciences that deal with knowledge and its processes, psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic, etc.
Every social media platform, every website is designed to be addictive and trigger emotional outbursts.
According to the CIA, the viral nature of the Internet has the potential to influence and even change a person’s character and also long-term future in a matter of seconds, regardless of who they are or their life experience.
The subordination of the media to the task of manipulating information, building states of opinion and thus shaping modes of action has become an essential part of the U.S. empire’s strategy to achieve hegemony in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult for it to manage.
They work to create hatred and fabricate negative perceptions; they work on weaknesses and deficiencies, on automatisms, fears, and identified stereotypes. Mastering stereotypes allows the manipulator to take control of the audience, based on subjective sources.
But CW goes much further, it accomplishes the task of degrading the capacity to produce knowledge. It targets the totality of human capital to undermine the trust that underpins an entire society. It aims to hack the individual.
CW operations are designed to create in people a rigid mindset that provokes resistance to any argument, information, or even reality check that contradicts their own perceptions and opinions.
On the other hand, they promote and stimulate aversive emotions, thoughts, and moods that can escalate to high levels of intensity that are very difficult to manage and sustain.
But this is not entirely new. The work of the US special services to control the human mind began with projects like MKUltra.
Also known as Artichoke, this project was a Dantean, chilling reality: experiments in the field of the human unconscious, drug testing, drugs, brain implants, surgery, lobotomy… a whole storehouse of horrors.
The task of conducting MKUltra fell in 1953 to the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), an entity founded in 1948 that came to involve more than 30 universities and scientific centers in the country.
Among the fields of interest in the research were the development of paranoia, the production of amnesia, the provocation of illogical thoughts through the use of drugs, the manipulation of violence, the study of the effect of ultrasound on human conglomerates, as well as studies on cancer and leukemia.
At present, the NBIC revolution is being used to control human beings, turning them into a weapon against themselves.
Traditional conditioning techniques have been enhanced and brought to a state of near perfection thanks to the capabilities of neuro-weapons.
It is a competition to appropriate our senses, our way of seeing the world, to turn us into puppets in the hands of a select elite that seeks to perpetuate its privileges without spending a bullet.
