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.’
The potency of tactics employed in IW are amplified by technological evolution; enormous tightly networked populations and readily available personal data means both individuals and groups can be precisely targeted with Information Operations (IO) or psyops engineered to exploit belief systems. Information Operations (IO) are the methods and tactics employed in advertising, in covert 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.
As well as the psyops or Information Operations (IO) 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 front-page article, labeling 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. The tactics used against W.B. Key then are used against scientists now if they oppose promiscuous vaccine use, phony climate change science, expose institutional corruption or any induced belief- frauds.
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 future course and direction 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.