Know your Mike Rogers.

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.

Since Key’s day, fMRI and ingenious experiments by behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely and many others have confirmed in a multitude of ways that habits, hunches, and conditioned responses is responsible for almost all non-formal human decision making. Even complex, procedural logic driven human decision-making has an intuitive component, which anyone involved with the advertising, market research or media content production knows.

For this reason, tactics and technologies which reliably influence the unconscious component of mind are highly developed. National, regional and local media are freighted with sounds, symbols and images, unperceived messages targeting consumers' unconscious, to be retained and held in memory to influence future decision-making.

As Key put it, “In spite of the evidence presented in this book, most Americans will still find it difficult to believe that their trusted, high-credibility information sources long ago betrayed them into the hands of profit hungry marketing executives who have quietly researched, developed and exhaustively applied a subliminal technology of communication that is now driving ever larger segments of the population to pathological behaviors. “