Information War, Non-Linear War, or as the Chinese call it Unrestricted War, is a perpetual conflict between nations and sovereign actors which employs every available means; economic, political, technological, to defeat an opponent. PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui noted in “Unrestricted Warfare,” a study published in China in 1999: “As the arena of war has expanded, encompassing the political, diplomatic cultural and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air space and electronics spheres the interactions among all factors have made it difficult for the military sphere to serve as the automatic dominant sphere in every war.’

In addition to overt content, news and entertainment contains implicit values, our unvoiced fears and unspoken hopes for the future. The potency of tactics employed in IO has been amplified by technological evolution which created enormous tightly networked populations and made increasing amounts of personal data available permitting individuals and groups to be precisely targeted with messaging engineered to exploit the target’s belief systems.

As well as the psyops or Information Operations carried out by the nation state militaries and intelligence agencies in undeclared conflicts, the public has had decades of exposure in peacetime to unperceived influence technologies employed by the advertising industry. When psychology professor Wilson Bryan Key documented the ubiquitous use of subliminal technologies in both advertising and editorial media content back in the 1980s, the industry made a significant and sophisticated effort to deny, distract and confuse the public about the issue. Advertising Age, the leading trade publication, attacked Key in a frontpage article, labelling him a dirty-minded crank, obsessed with imaginary obscenities in media content and trotting out a legion of paid experts to dispute, discredit and ultimately dismiss the possibility subliminal embeds were ever widely used in advertising or could ever hope to be effective.

Entertainment is not just entertainment, it is adult education, consumer conditioning and social engineering. It is the principal mechanism employed by nation states to reliably influence social behavior.

The content of entertainment exerts significant, predictable effects on human behavior and belief systems and over the course and direction of future scientific, economic and moral evolution. Entertainment directs popular attention, lends support to or selectively subverts social issues, fosters unity or division and incrementally enhances or gradually constricts collective cognitive capacity. “Entertainment” determines who we are, and who we will be.