Information Poisoning is a catch all description for the cognitive impairment resulting from Information Operations. Information Operations (IO)are the methods and tactics employed in advertising, in covert and overt social control systems and “unrestricted,” non-linear or Information War. Tactics employed in wartime against enemy civilian populations are the same employed in peacetime to sell consumer goods.
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 media 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.