Tunicates, or sea squirts spend a portion of their lives as independent free-swimming individuals, later they root beneath subtidal surface to spawn new individuals from stem cells in their cape or tunic forming a community with a common blood supply. The functions of individual members of the community is coordinated by the information circulating throughout the superorganism, in tunicates that is the blood supply; in the human super organism it’s the media content which circulates on social networks or is generated for our consumption by the bloodline families who control legacy media and who have profited from the manipulation of citizens programmed only to consume.
In addition to overt content, news and entertainment contain 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 their belief systems.
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.
In addition to 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 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.