THE LAST PSYOP
My Open-Source Marketing lab is hosting a “Psyops Hackathon” // “Propaganda Party” this September 4 - 7, in Austin TX.
Sign up here: https://luma.com/jf6pwpr7
This is a first of its kind event: it will have a similar structure to a hackathon or a game jam, in that there’s a kick off & team formation Friday. Teams work Friday evening, all day Saturday, and get ready to present by Sunday noon. Instead of a game or an app, we’re going to do psyops. Each team is going to launch a live op on the internet, while staff/volunteers record what is happening behind the scenes & how they are doing it.
We’re pulling the curtains up on how the sausage is made, on how information manipulation works at scale. The team that triggers the biggest / most skillful wave across the internet with minimal debris wins.
We’re not yet ready to sell tickets, but you can sign up here to let us know if you can make it and get notified. You can sign up as a player, a potential sponsor, or come join “the meta game” (me & my team working on putting together this event).
The team is currently:
Omar - owner/executor of Prosocial Engineering
Kat_The_Vat - chief of staff for the event & game designer
Raphael “mudboy” Lyon - operations & fiscal infrastructure
The Luma event is the front page, and the GitHub is the backstage where you can see the project state.
The most notable participant we have signed on is John Arquilla. As far as I understand he’s like the guy who invented many of the concepts of psyops & cyber warfare?? He’s agreed to give the kickoff speech because Katt is designing the game & the rules based on his work. Like, take the “wargame simulations”, and apply that to “cyber warfare”. This conference/event is about teaching you how to play the game, to become a live player, in the battlefield over our minds.
More to come from Katt on that next Monday.
Q:“THE LAST PSYOP” ?
A: Yes.
I am pitching it this way because I think once you understand how psyops work, it completely changes your relationship to the information landscape. Therefore, a grand meta psyop where we spread the MVP of understanding psyops to as wide of a slice of society as possible permanently changes the game. Raises the epistemic waterline to a new level. A new baseline of literacy.
I’m really excited about it because this isn’t just a thing for “weird internet people”. We actually know how to make anyone “memetically aware”, not matter how normie they are. We, in the meta game group, regularly test this on our friends & moms. Here is me explaining to Shadow Rebbe this morning:
Let me talk briefly about some of the concrete things I want to see at the event.
The ops need to be wholesome and NOT cause debris. It needs to be something that affected subjects will at minimum feel neutral about, or ideally positive. And everything must be documented & published once it’s complete. An example of this is my first open source psyop with Adam Aleksic last year.
Here is an example of something that I am currently cooking: imagine if the application to the event asked you to describe your “internet history journey”.
And then I seed it with the answers from an initial set of people, including myself:
Now imagine we have this data live, and anyone can visualize it as it comes in. Imagine as this little form or app spreads across the internet, you get more “paths” opening up (you’d have a map of “coverage” of internet territory). We make that the homepage of the conference, and if there’s gaps, we show “all the roads” leading to rome kind of thing.
I don’t yet know the rules of the game that Katt is designing, but this would be an amazing op to see unfold, and I would expect teams/spectators to help each other (like say, a big YouTuber makes a post about it to push into a new part of internet territory).
And of course, other teams may move to sabotage the spread of the thing…
What’s happening with ORI?
S.A. Senchal and I were in SF this weekend, at “The Founding Assembly for Machine Consciousness Research”. His talk was about why LLMs are not conscious, and what needs to change for a system to become conscious. The segue into religion was him describing how all conscious agents navigate the same “geometry” (of possible futures), and that religions are algorithms or strategies for navigating that universal geometry of reality.
He ended with the strong claim that we can rigorously study & test this. Hence: computational or mathematical ethics as a field. Or “mathematical theology”?
This was a big success for ORI.
As I talked it to people this weekend, I realized a simple way to explain ORI is that it’s a game where we pretend that the public internet is a giant, planet-wide university. How do you “apply” at this planetary university? How do you get your work reviewed? Where can you find a queue of people looking to get reviewed?
Anyone building infrastructure that helps people “enter” and rise up in this university is ORI staff1. I acted like the admissions officer // dean // grad student that Sam first approached, and I brought him into my peer group, whom he impressed, and then he moved up the ladder to more serious researchers, until he went all the way up to the world experts in the field, and contributed to the frontier of human knowledge.
I’ve been talking about launching “ORI 2.0” now that I have several successful closed loops like Sam. I know how the admissions process works for our planetary university, I know how to optimize the ladder from the backtier to the frontier (and back). I have (some ideas) for grant & resource allocation to reward successful contributions, and how to seed entry points in IRL spaces in my city & other cities, so it’s not just an online thing. I am going to be working on this in the coming months and will likely use the September event as a launch event.
A teaser for what’s coming up:
I mentioned I was in court last week. The verdict is now public:
Now, APPARENTLY, just because you win your trial, it doesn’t mean you actually get the money. The money may not even exist!!! What then???
I’ve asked the defendent if he would come on a podcast with me and we can re-enact the trial, with the internet being the jury. That, of course, is absolutely insane and the lawyers said absolutely do not this. So of course I wanna do it!! I believe both sides care about the truth surfacing & a fair, positive sum ending for everyone in this story. If this does NOT crash and burn, it would be a beautiful, wholesome experiment that I hope others will choose to replicate.
It would be a great way to launch Anatomy of an Internet Argument. If ORI is the planetary university, AoIA is the planetary court. I trust the system & the meta system that repairs the system if it’s faulty. If I am asking others to rely on it, then I must put my own skin in the game. I must abide by whatever verdict this game will produce.
Godspeed.
we need a pangram but for psyops
Thank you constantine (@const_) for creating this beautiful image. It came in “just in time” as we were discussing how to put out the call to find all the others who wish to raise the epistemic waterline with us this September.
Pangram is a popular “AI detector” company where if people suspect that a piece of writing is AI generated, they can @ the company and they will run the tool & give you the answer.
My video “How to semantic search the internet” is one such example. The homepage of ORI says “we’re not accepting new members” but that’s a psyop, the actual website is here, as my secret to you dear reader: https://openresearchinstitute.org/actual.html
Damnit I should have named it OUR LAST PSYOP
(So that we can say "have you heard about our last psyop?" And it either means, this finality. Or it means, the most recent one, because now you're inducted into the game and you're regularly aware of the most recent psyop)
> I’m really excited about it because this isn’t just a thing for “weird internet people”. We actually know how to make anyone “memetically aware”, not matter how normie they are. We, in the meta game group, regularly test this on our friends & moms.
I love how you write. Feels like I'm "in on it"