Do Your Own Research: From the Bible to ChatBots: A History of Psyops w/ Trevor Paglen

**Richard Hames** (0:08)
I am subject to media manipulation campaigns all the time. Not because I'm someone special, but because I live in the same media environment that you do, and therefore you are also probably subject to these same manipulation techniques.
That's what advertising is. It's what political campaigning is. And it's certainly what a lot of social media is. But there's now a new class of technologies that goes a step further, and moves from just predicting what kinds of videos you will find funny or persuasive or just rage-mating enough to share into predicting directly the brain states that will result if you are shown a particular video or text or image. This technology has been around for a long time. It relies on fMRI scanning, which is a pretty standard technique. But in the last month, there has been a big improvement in our ability to predict what exactly the brain will do when shown a given image. This doesn't mean that we're at the mind-reading stage of technology yet. This machine still requires your active participation. It's very obvious when it's happening, you get put in a big machine to make the predictions anywhere half decent. But the fact there is this tendency towards systems that are more and more capable of predicting you, of controlling you, and of manipulating you without you even realising it, is of course deeply concerning. And it's a power that certainly shouldn't be in the hands of the people it's currently in, and ideally shouldn't really be in the hands of anyone at all.
So where did this all come from?
You probably have heard of the programme MKUltra. It was a secret programme run by the CIA to test the limits of human manipulation. But there is so much more to the story of how we ended up in our manipulative media environment. Sycophantic chatbots, psyops, blatant media lies, disinformation campaigns, deepfakes, conspiracy theories that take people to the edge of madness, conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, the practice of flooding the zone with shit, as Trump Lieutenant Steve Bannon once put it. We are in a deep crisis when it comes to ascertaining what it is that is true and what it is that is false. That's why we have to do our own research.
So who do you talk to when your thoughts are spiralling like these are? Trevor Paglen. Trevor Paglen is one of the most important artists in the world right now, but also one of the most generative thinkers on the questions of media manipulation, the history of those new technologies. And he's also a really lovely guy who is definitely not sioping anyone. And one of the few people in the world who will indulge my longstanding and extremely embarrassing interest in UFOs. This is one of those conversations that goes all over the map, from our conversations with Alfred McCoy about the history of the Cold War subterfuge, right through to Quince Le Bode and Ben Tarnov's theories about where the Elon Musk Empire might be heading next, particularly cyborg Musk. I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. Trevor Paglen, welcome to Do Your Own Research.

**Trevor Paglen** (3:24)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be here today with you.

**Richard Hames** (3:27)
We spoke about three years ago, and we spoke about your work documenting CIA black sites. We spoke about aliens, UFOs, the UFO phenomena. And one thing we didn't speak about, and one thing I didn't ask you, because it would be more insane than UFOs, more insane than networks of black sites, is whether or not you think a substantial portion of global power is wielded by elite billionaire paedophiles with plausible connections to Israeli intelligence. I didn't ask you that because it's obviously insane. It is now 2026, right? It is not 2023 anymore, those wonderful halcyon days when everything was clear, when everyone understood everything that was going on. Right, we are now through the looking glass.
Do you think to some extent that conspiracy theory has been validated as a methodology for understanding the world?

**Trevor Paglen** (4:23)
That's a really good question. To a certain extent, yes.
I used to live down the street from a guy who is a very famous CIA officer, the guy who the movie Siriana was based on. I was in graduate school at the time and we would have lunch from time to time, we were friends. It was really interesting to talk to him because he would look at the work I was doing in social science and say, you're analyzing this and you have theories of value and structural forms of power. He's like, that's all there. But there is something to be said for knowing that the nephew of this Saudi prince, who's the head of this part of the Defense Department, is gay and nobody knows it. He's like, that has enormous geopolitical consequences that you cannot understand through a structural lens. That's a long way of saying, yes, there is something to that in the sense that there are actors and those actors have idiosyncrasies. And those idiosyncrasies can have huge snowball effects.