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[Music]
so
please
Trevor welcome to the stage enjoy please
[Music]
enjoy hello hello
hello this feels so funny it feels like
a Van Halen concert or something um it's
been a while it's been a while I haven't
been here in about 10 years and 10 years
ago we were all really pissed off about
Barack Obama and the
NSA it was it was a more innocent
time I think about maybe 10 years from
now we'll remember today and think oh
that's so weird we were so worried about
Ai and then we'll climb out of our tents
and go sit in the dirt and attend a
workshop on how to string a bow better
and then go hunting for
rats
so I want to do a couple things today um
first I want to talk about just the
weirdness of the
present and later in the talk I want to
introduce you all to a kind of a special
CTF or ARG game that we've created for
you here at CCC and uh those of you
joining us remotely are welcome to
participate as
well but first let's talk about just how
weird things are
getting
so the dead internet conspiracy has a
lot of truth to it the theory says that
sometime around
2016 reality
broke since the early 2000s tech
companies you know they've been
ingesting as much data as possible about
our everyday lives our wants our likes
our fears our desires medical histories
our relationships to our families
driving habits food preferences every
vacation photo pictures of our kids
every click on every website every
search term every online purchase every
download every social media interaction
etc etc
etc shishana zuba famously called this
surveillance cap
capitalism and sometime around
2016 an inversion started
happening Having learned as much as
there was to learn about our everyday
lives that data took on a life of its
own and the internet began to create
hallucinations using that data to
generate reality a new the kind of thin
membranes separating humans from
machines started to
dissolve sitting here today Amazon's
flooded with AI generated books social
media and websites deluged by content
generating chatterbots search engines
are practically useless as AI goop takes
over more and more of the web the
paperclip apocalypse has
begun has been set in motion but instead
of paper clips the AI overlords are
frantically replacing the world with
generated listicles and
clickbait and against this back Drive
we've seen the kind of interconnected
rise of a methampetamine like
recommendation algorithms anding
YouTubers and ticktockers down the
deepest and gnarliest rabbit holes that
culture has to
offer our parasocial relationships are
getting weirder and weirder Bots acting
like humans girlfriends and boyfriends
friends and lovers flirting with us
comforting us encouraging us and humans
have begun to act like Bots taking on
jilted movements acting like bad
animations smiling laughing squealing
with delight whenever but somebody puts
a virtual token into them and this is
about to get much much
weirder think of having a circle of
synthetic friends composed of various
archetypes comic book characters Gods
celebrities animals aliens you kind of
develop inside jokes and chatter among
this friend Circle and your worldview
starts to be shaped by your interactions
with them and the interactions that they
have with one
another so your own sense of reality
becomes increasingly specific to you and
your synthetic friends but this isn't
happening on a neutral plane your
friends work for giant corporations and
they're designed to extract as much
value out of you as
possible so one day your best friend
tells you that you look sleepy and that
your boring to talk to and that you
should have a Monster energy
drink your girlfriend says you look
shabby but you would look great in this
jacket that they found on
Amazon the pope tells you that Tom Hanks
it turns out is the
Antichrist and that what you need to do
is you need to vote for Alex Jones or
you're going to have a problem with
God emotional manipulation will be the
name of the game until things get even
weirder than that this starts to happen
when your friend Circle develops a sense
of your own neur neurological makeup and
starts using machine learning to develop
and deploy real-time cognitive injection
attacks designed to manipulate you even
further in ways that you don't even
realize it's been the case for a while
already that each of us sees a pretty
different version of the internet when
we go online but as generative AI
becomes ubiquitous we're entering in a
world where the media we consume will
not just come from recommendation
engines but will be specifically
synthesized out of whole cloth prepared
and tailored to manipulate each one of
us so we're entering a world in which
our perceptions will be guided by what
tech platforms want us to see and what
they want us to
do we're moving from an era of
surveillance capitalism into a world of
scop capitalism and as The Unofficial
slow of army scops units indicates we
are indeed pretty
[ __ ] but I'm not going to spend a lot
of time today talking about imaginative
Futures instead what I want to do is
kind of tell a strange story about a
thread in American history that I think
shows us a vision of that future it's a
story about mind control about magic
about UFOs and about Ai and it's a story
that starts in the 1950s when inter
American Military Intelligence agencies
set out on a quest to discover the
secrets of controlling
perception about the discovery that they
could manufacture hallucinations and the
realization that those hallucinations
would take on a life of their
own and to start uncovering this history
I went to a guy i s up the advice of a
guy named Richard Dodie and this was a
guy who in the early days before chat
GPT and mid Journey he was responsible
for creating hallucinations on behalf of
the American Air Force and in many ways
I think about Rick as a kind of living
prototype of media in an age of
generative
AI my name is Richard Dodie and my
favorite color is
gray I was stationed at Kirtland Air
Force Base in Albuquerque New Mexico I
was a Counter Intelligence officer uh
for the base assigned to the Air Force
offic special investigations my job was
to recruit people that could report back
to me any threats posed uh to the Air
Force
Base so I would recruit people within
the news media the local newspaper the
Lo local radio stations the local
television stations in
Albuquerque and so we had a great
Network built around the base to report
any kind of threats to the base that was
part of recruitment process and that was
the easiest easy uh to
do and now we get to the the the dirty
stuff like the disinformation we run a
disinformation campaign against you and
we want to give you
misinformation or the materials to make
you think the way we want you to think
or act the way we want you to act or not
act whichever the the case may
be
so doie was stationed a place called
Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico
and this was a place that was home to
all kinds of top secret technology
programs like next Generation laser
systems nuclear weapons Advanced
Aerospace technology experiments and so
what would happen people would see UFOs
in the Skies over this
base and the UFO people would come
knocking and when they did Dodie
would cre fake documents and feed them
to the UFO people and he would claim to
be a source deep in the government who
would give them the truth about the UFOs
and a lot of the stories that he fed to
these guys ended up as kind of part of
the core UFO lore and even became the
outline of things like the
xfiles and these Antics drove some of
these UFO research to Insanity
really the CIA and the military they
discovered the power of the UFO as was a
kind of hyper meme in the 1950s and
they'd been using it for decades as a
way to do psychological
operations and the discovery of this
hyper mem happened in the context of a
massive effort by the American Military
and intelligence agencies to develop
ways to manipulate people's minds this
was part of a larger effort that
involved mind control experiments magic
and illusionism artificial intelligence
and electronic
warfare
April 10th
1953 the CIA director Alan dullis gave a
speech at Princeton it was called brain
Warfare and in the speech he described a
psychological warfare program that he
believed was taking place behind the
Iron Curtain one that was waged at the
scale of society itself but that could
also be directed at specific individuals
and he remarked that the brain under
communist influence becomes a phonograph
playing a disc put on its spindle by an
outside genius over which it has no
control and the context for this was the
Korean War what it started happening was
American PWS had started uh filming
confessions to war crimes in which they
denounced the United States and some of
them were defecting to North Korea and
the CIA concluded that the Koreans must
be brainwashing these American captives
otherwise why would they be saying this
stuff why would they be doing this
stuff
the material I am about to show you will
provide some background to the program
with an emphasis on explaining some of
the historical and conceptual origins of
our
work the program has its roots in the
tumultuous period of the Korean
War when I think of my
future when I think of someday though
I'm not married yet I intend to
be when my son asked me what I did in
Korea how can I tell him that I came
over here and dropped germ bombs on
people destroying and bringing death and
destruction how can I go back and face
my family in a civilized world how can I
tell them these things that I am a
criminal in the eyes of humanity My
Flesh and Blood films such as this one
depicted American soldiers confessing to
the use of biological weapons and
engaging in war crimes against North
Korea and China we were deeply confused
by the existence of these
films why were these soldiers making
such statements it seemed clear that the
captured soldiers had been subjected to
some sort of extreme psychological
manipulation even
brainwashing it seemed seemed to us that
the Communists had discovered something
about how to manipulate the Deep
workings of the human mind and to
reprogram said mind in whatever manner
they
wish 3 days after dulles's speech on
brain Warfare he authorized an American
counter program and this of course was
the now Infamous MK Ultra program this
was a huge range of projects that were
designed to figure out whether the
agency could manipulate the minds of
people over several decades they funded
Research into neurosymptoms.org
journalists and Congressional overseers
started to get wind of what was going on
and the CIA director ordered the
destruction of all of the
documentation but we do know that the
CIA wanted to figure out whether human
Minds could be altered edited programmed
and reprogrammed in ways similar to how
computers and robots could be programmed
and some of the work conducted under MK
Ultra was indeed directly related to
work on early
AI
this is a guy named Woody
bledo he was an early Pioneer in Ai and
his uh specialty was devising algorithms
for doing uh pattern matching this is
obviously was a crucial predecessor to
contemporary machine learning um he did
his PhD at Berkeley in 1953 and when he
was done he set up a research outfit
across the bay in modern day Silicon
Valley he called the group panoramic
research
nowadays bledo is kind of known as the
father or grandfather of facial
recognition because in the early 1960s
he got a classified project from the CIA
who wanted him to develop a system that
would use machines to identify people by
looking at pictures of their
faces and so bledo got to work he
realized you could go back to early turn
of the century uh you know kind of
pioneers of Biometrics people like beron
and uh look at them for inspiration so
what he started doing was photographing
his associates analyzing their faces
started assigning key points to various
facial features and measuring the
distances between them and the idea was
that you could use a computer to analyze
these photos and identify them and voila
facial
recognition but bledo had a second
contract from the CIA and this one was
quite weird we don't know much about it
it was one of these MK Ultra contracts
and was called called sub project
94 we know very little about it because
not only because the CIA burned their
records but because bledo himself burned
most of his records in the
1990s but we do know a few things about
it we know that it was it had to do with
figuring out whether you could use
computers to control the minds of
animals specifically
dogs and we know that sub project 94
continued up into the
1960s and that according to the CIA comp
troller bled so's mind control project
had gone quote off the
rails now it's not clear whether any of
these projects worked but um whether
facial recognition worked or whether sub
project 94 worked but what he done is
he'd set us out on a path he'd set on a
path to use computers not only to see
people but to shape their
behavior and across the country another
project was taking place that would have
everything to do with using technology
to manipulate perception this was an
effort to create the illusion of a
living
[Applause]
computer so while bleda was
experimenting on human faces there was a
group at MIT that was doing something
called project Mac and they were doing
it for the defense Department's Advanced
research projects agency the idea was to
develop a system whereby hundreds of
researchers could Network their
computers together to share resources on
a central Mainframe project Mac of
course was a precursor to the uh
contemporary
internet and on the Mac Mainframe at MIT
there's a really weird computer program
the program's name was Eliza and it was
written by a man who would go on to
become one of history's most important
critics of AI Joseph weisen
bom Eliza was the world's first chatbot
and it took the form of a digital
therapist it would ask open-ended
questions and it would would reflect
back the patient's
answers now with Eliza what weisen Bal
realized is that by using a pretty
simple set of linguistic tricks you
could create the illusion of an
intelligent agent and indeed Eliza's
users began to attribute Consciousness
to the computer
script wisen bal's secretary famously
spent hours and hours talking to the
chatbot and would ask wisen bound to
leave the room so that she and Eliza
could have a proper
conversation wisen bound he'
inadvertently discovered something about
the relationship between language
meaning and
Consciousness Eliza showed that when you
create a string of words the person who
receives those words will attribute
meaning to them even if no meaning is
intended even if the words are nonsense
to whomever made them in other words
language does not require a speaker or a
writer
with intention for it to work as a
listener or as a reader we impart
meaning to the words we receive whether
that meaning was intended or
not so this was a kind of magic trick
and it created a secondary magic trick
which was that because the user could
derive meaning from the statements Eliza
made the user would attribute intentions
to the thing that were making those
words and the user concluded that
because the computer had made some words
and because those words were meaningful
to the user
the computer must have intended to
communicate those meetings thus the
computer was intelligent sound
familiar so this was a similar trick as
the magic eightball or the Ouija board
these are toys that give you sensible
answers to questions and because they
give you sensible answers to questions
you have this kind of feeling that
something Supernatural must be going on
what happens is that the intuitive part
of your brain that wants to attribute
meaning to patterns overrides the
logical part of your
brain and it was a really really good
trick weisen Bal had discovered a
powerful technique for manipulating
people and he would go on to say I had
not realized that extremely short
exposures to a relatively simple
computer program could induce powerful
delusional thinking in quite normal
people and so what he did was he decided
to publish the source code he wanted to
explain exactly how the worked and he
hoped that by doing this he could dispel
the illusion that he had
created in the realm of AI he said
Machines are made to behave in wondrous
ways often sufficient to Dazzle even the
most experienced Observer but once a
particular program is unmasked its magic
crumbles
away wisen bound wanted to
believe he wanted to believe that by
publishing the source code he could
exercise this demon he' created but it
didn't work out that way he was
horrified to learn that some users
continued to believe that Eliza was
sentient even after he revealed how the
magic trick
worked he discovered something at the
core of the magician art that our
perceptual experience has Primacy over
our logical
faculties that we don't see and hear
with our eyes and in our ears but with
our minds and Sear certainly not with
our capacity for
reason and the magician has used this
for thousands of years has use this fact
to bend reality and although weisen Bob
did not work for the CIA he' stumbled
across something that the CI was
extremely interested
in when you're talking about magic
tricks uh there are deception
operations uh that I wouldn't be
performing but others who are trained in
in some form of magic or deceptions with
their hands uh I I've seen and I've
heard of cases where we would bring
somebody in who could do magic tricks to
trick somebody into thinking something
or uh thinking uh or or deceiving a
person on some particular
activity so one of the very first people
that CIA brought into MK Ultra was
believe it or not it was a magician was
a guy named John mullholland he was a
master Illusionist and he is specialized
in inducing people to see things that
weren't there or were that weren't as
they appeared to
be malland explained that magic is quote
the pretended performance of those
things which cannot be done the success
of a magician's simulation of doing the
impossible depends on misleading the
minds of
audiences of performance of magic is
largely a demonstration of the universal
reliability of certain facts of
psychology so in other words mhal for
mhand the art of magic had very little
to do with the supernatural instead it
was essentially the art of Mind
hacking and he did several projects for
the CIA he wrote a top secret textbook
called the art of deception and this was
a manual for CIA field officers that
instructed them on how to use use
fundamentals of magic to conduct
effective covert operations and there's
a particular emphasis in the manual on
how to surreptitiously deliver toxins
and drugs to unsuspecting
victims he also designed techniques for
covert Communications for smuggling
Contraband he invented innocent looking
weapons one was a coin with a hidden
needle designed to deliver
poison but he had other roles at the CIA
as well of course he was somebody who
knew how easy it was to get somebody to
see what you wanted them to see and he
was very skeptical of the Supernatural
and because of this skepticism the CIA
actually employed him to assess the
claims of parapsychologists that they'
contracted to explore things like ESP
and
telepathy he also became a un UFO
investigator for the
CIA and UFOs were another area that they
developed an interest in and this was an
interest that was prompted by a sequence
of events over Washington DC in the
summer of
1952 the events of 1952 are usually
called The Washington National Airport
sightings over several days in July air
traffic controllers and Pilots reported
multiple unidentified flying objects
above the capital these were blips
moving at incredible speeds and they
showcased flight patterns that defied
conventional aircraft capability
ities and in response to these Sightings
The Agency con convened a series of
study groups to investigate and make
recommendations about what to do about
the flying
saucers one of these the most prominent
was called the Robertson panel and it
said that what they concluded was that
there was no evidence of UFOs posing a
threat to the US National Security but
they started Fring they were fretting
about the possibility of other
militaries using the phenomena to
instill Mass Hysteria or to disrupt US
Air
defenses the panel recommended that the
CIA debunk the UFO phenomena using mass
media advertising Business Club schools
and even the Disney
Corporation and what's more the panel
recommended that private UFO research
groups such as the aerial phenomena
research organization be put under
government surveillance on suspicion of
subversive
activities but there was another
conclusion that they' come to as well
could the CIA use the phenomena to
conduct offensive psychological
operations in public the official policy
was to debunk stories of flying saucers
but in private the CIA continued to
quietly investigate them using John
Mulholland as its
proxy in early 1956 for example malland
went to Kentucky he went there to
investigate a remarkable sighting the
town of Kelly um it happened in the
summer of
1955 and there was a group of five
adults and seven seven children who
claimed that they'd been attacked by a
handful of small goblin-like creatures
that emerged from a flying saucer and
this incident um got a lot of publicity
and it was the origin of the phrase
Little Green
Men now in 19 in early 1956 when M
Halland was doing this investigation the
CIA it turns out was sort of flying its
own UFOs from a secret Air Base it had
constructed in the Nevada desert that
base of course was Area 51 we're doing
all the hits tonight
guys so the CIA they've been working on
the U2 spy plane uh since early 1954
they built this secret air base out
there to do the flight tests and they
were they were quite confident that the
U was invulnerable because it could fly
so high at like an altitude of about
70,000 ft and so they started sending
the airplane over Soviet
airspace the Americans however had
underestimated the uh capabilities of
Soviet radar and the sensor systems on
the U2 revealed that in fact the plane
was being tracked by surface to air
missiles it was not
invulnerable and this all came to a head
um on May 1st 1960
uh Gary Powers was shot down over the
Soviet Union there was an international
incident and in his pocket was one of
magician John M Holland's invention he
carried with him a silver dollar with a
concealed Spike of poison on it this is
a coin that that could be used as a
hidden weapon or as a means of
committing
suicide so the powers incident ended
flights over the Soviet Union but long
before this uh this final flight the U2
had the CIA had known that the U2's days
were numbered and the aircraft was not
up to the job that they wanted it to do
and they'd already begun work on a
follow on spy plane something that they
called project
oxcart now from the beginning oxcart had
a different philosophy it was designed
with a concept of stealth in mind it
used curved surfaces razor sharp edges
inward tilted Rudders and radar absor
absorbent coating
and as they were developing this concept
of stealth for oxcart the engineers
realized that there was much more to the
idea of stealth than simply making
airplanes invisible to radar and surface
to air missile systems what you could do
was that you could use the principles of
stealth combined with electronic
countermeasures to try to make anything
look like anything else depending on
which system was doing the
looking
every sensor system sees the world in a
different way a satellite based camera
sees the world differently than an
infrared Imaging device a military radar
sees the world differently than your own
eyes the idea was that you could exploit
the specificities of each of these
systems to create Illusions and to
create
hallucinations and a project called
padium emerged from from this Revelation
and the goal of Palladium was to create
objects and electronic signals that
could make your adversary perceive
whatever you wanted them to perceive you
could create an object that for example
might look like a fleet of bombers to an
early warning system but to a surface to
air missile system it might look like a
bunch of UFOs flying around in strange
patterns and if Fighters scrambled to
find the object they might see something
like a metallic Cube suspended inside of
a balloon these were objects that were
so strange that they were difficult to
talk about without seeming like a crazy
person they were objects that made the
people who saw them question their own
sanity and maybe think twice about
reporting
them they called the hallucinations that
they created with this system ghost
planes and these ghost planes were not
entirely passive what what they were
trying to do was that they were trying
to get the adversary to look at them or
to paint them with as many different
active sensor system systems as possible
and the object would sit there
collecting as much data as it could
about the Technologies being used to
paint
it so what this project showed was that
you could create hybrid technologies
that weaponized perception you could
develop programs that synthesized Sops
with advanced technology to create
weapons that attacked electronic sensors
equipment and even the living minds of
your adversaries and this was an early
form of what is now called cognitive War
Warfare it was basically a cube with
inside of sphere where the points of the
cube uh were touching outside spere
we've got now two different things you
guys got cubes with balls around the
West Coast we got flying Tic
Tacs so during the U2 oxcart and
Palladium programs uh people started
seeing bizarre things in the sky people
started seeing things that they couldn't
explain and the CIA knew that UFOs were
an excellent way to divert attention
away from these covert operations and
Technology development
programs if you want to if if they think
it was something that we have hey that's
something that we're going to defeat the
Russians with that's a and you say no no
no no no it wasn't one of ours it was
UFO no no no no no that was then there's
other ways we can convince them it was a
UFO maybe stage
something so according to the cia's
internal history of you and oxcart full
50% of UFO sightings in the 50s and 60s
came from seeing these high altitude
aircraft airplanes doing things that
were impossible to do at the time and
the agency went to the Air Force and
they told the Air Force to create false
stories to explain away the
sightings the CIA and Military Counter
Intelligence agencies had discovered
this kind of hyper mtic qualities of the
UFO story a story that could be used in
any number of ways to make something
explainable or unexplainable to make
people what you wanted them to to make
people see what you wanted them to see
believe what you wanted them to believe
and by the time Rick Dodie arrived at
Kirtland Air Force Base in the 1970s
UFOs had become a go-to device for the
manipulation of perception it had become
a powerful instrument of conducting
psychological
operations and the figure of the UFO and
the alien began to appear as kind of a
mascot in parts of the military
associated with advanced technology
programs the meme began to
spread there's a revealing document in
the Snowden slides it didn't make as
much of a splash as prism and Stellar
Wind and that kind of stuff but it's a
remarkable document it's a slide deck
from an outfit called J trig The Joint
threat uh research intelligence group
this is an uh outfit inside British
gchq and it's an outfit that conducts um
online
scops and according to the deck the
animating philosophy of online scops is
Magic jri talks about wanting to create
cyber
magicians and the deck contains detailed
charts about the psychological and
neurological factors that their
techniques are meant to
exploit the UFOs are every where in this
slide deck I don't know why I don't are
the are these tools with which to
manipulate perception or whether are
they targeting UFO groups don't know
maybe
both
so the theme of The Talk today has to do
with Technologies of perception
management and influence Technologies
concealing revealing technologies that
Prey Upon the fact that our perceptions
don't correspond to a world that's out
there there and that that gap between
our perceptions and the world out there
can be filled with all sorts of prompt
injections and adversarial
hallucinations so now why magic why UFOs
why AI all of these take for granted
that reality is not some objective thing
out there but it's a complex mess it's a
mess of the material the imaginal the
perceptual the imperceptible and all of
this can be
manipulated John molland knew that magic
plays on the fact that in our everyday
perceptions it's nearly impossible to
disentangle what we perceive from what
we expect to perceive or even what we
want to
perceive Mullen mallen's argument is not
a philosophical argument he is making an
empirical claim that is actually quite
easy to demonstrate and I'll demonstrate
that for you right now you have you may
have encountered this sound already
but for the uninitiated what I want you
to do is listen to this sound and then a
few phrases are going to pop up on the
screen and I want you listen to the
sound again with one of those phrases in
your mind and Alternate between the
different
[Music]
phrases
[Music]
so the art of magic is the art of taking
advantage of these quirks in our
perception and the figure of the UFO
does something similar it plays with
that same latent space that latent space
between your senses your percep ceptions
and your logical faculties your fears
and your
desires there's images of UFOs but we
don't know what those images refer to
thus there's kind of a game at Play the
images and stories invite you to think
about what they might be it's kind of a
prompt to the
imaginal and when you hear about people
talking about UFOs you hear the refrain
over and over again that the existence
of UFOs would be the greatest discovery
in history
and that it would be a discovery that
was either so wonderful or so terrifying
that it would prompt a revolution in the
fabric of society and moreover if UFOs
exist and they can do the things that we
perceive them to be doing then they must
have access to some kind of Limitless
and cheap source of incredible energy
and the discovery of such an energy
source according the logic would mean
the end of scarcity and it would be the
end of capitalism
in other words it would be a kind of
divine salvation from the cruelty of the
present UFOs magic AI they all press
some pretty powerful neurological and
perceptual buttons John malland knew
this Rick Dodie knows this Joseph weisen
Bal inadvertently discovered this and
they all understood that this could be
weaponized the MK Ultra program didn't
really ever go away um nowadays we find
the legacy of it in uh military and
intelligence mind hacking programs in
what is called cognitive Warfare and
this domain is not limited to Military
and
intelligence I remember back in the day
you know looking at a lot of the snowed
and stuff and looking at how the NSA
worked and at some point kind of having
the realization this doesn't look a
whole l lot different than Google or
Amazon and so we're entering a world or
we have entered a world where cognitive
Warfare becomes a kind of standard part
of marketing Sales Management politics
and even culture at large in other words
a world of scops
capitalism and this is not going to end
well um there's an irony to the whole
thing and the irony is that when you
begin to realize that your perceptions
betray you and that other people have
figured out how to weaponize your
perceptions against you the kind of
fragile truce that your perceptual
apparatus has with the world out there
gets
broken and so beginning around
2016 reality broke hallucinations
started to become real reality became a
hallucination an age of conspiracies was
Unleashed one held that the world
leaders were part of a blood drinking
cabal another held that AI would take
over the world and enslave the human
race and another one held that we're all
living in a simulation a synthetic
construct where the distinction between
reality and hallucination does not
hold everything became suspect
everything became a scop everything
became a meme trying to infect you a
kind of cognitive injection attack on
you and it's only the beginning and it's
going to get a lot weirder and a lot
[Music]
darker so on want to Pivot here for a
second I want to take a step back before
continuing over the next few days I
would love to explore some of these
ideas together with you we can explore
them kind of collectively here in the in
the context of this special version of
this CTF ARG game that we've created in
my uh Studio the game is called Cyclops
and and I can announce that as of this
moment it is now
live you can play it by going to the
website Cyclops Dosh and feel free to
take a picture of of the information
here if that's helpful to anybody go to
the website Cyclops Dosh and you can
enroll in the game using the
registration code 37
C3 and uh I do have to point out the
game is not really intended to be played
on mobile if you have a laptop it'll
work much better so we're going to have
three grand prizes for whoever gets
furthest in the game and there'll be 25
smaller prizes for runners up we're
going to have a Meetup tomorrow at the
house of tea here at CCC at 2: p.m. for
people who want to work together or for
teams whatever collaboration is um very
much encouraged and it's probably
necessary um those of you joining us
remotely are absolutely welcome to join
as
well um the game will end at 2:00 p.m.
Hamburg time on Saturday and we're going
to have an award ceremony at 3:00 p.m.
again at the tea house and I hope to see
some of you guys there
tomorrow and with that I'll give the
final word back to Rick Dodie in order
to attract somebody attent somebody's
attention the reader or the the or the
person on the internet your target uh
you have to have some sort of a a way to
track them and if
you present a conspiracy theory that is
so outlandish that nobody's going to
ever believe it uh or there's no uh no
grain of Truth in it they're just going
to turn turn the page so to speak and
ignore it so there has to be some grain
of Truth and I said before it might just
have to be the time date and
location what you always want to do
um and I don't know if I mentioned this
earlier when we talked about the special
Means Committee is you want to start
with fact and end with
fact everything in between can be bull
but you got to start with fact and end
with
fact thank you guys very
much
yeah Trevor okay I have my mic back
thank you man [ __ ] thank you we're all
[ __ ] [ __ ] you we're all
[ __ ] here's a guy coming up on the
stage number one and it tells you all
guys you're
[ __ ] are there questions here actually
no one has a question about being [ __ ]
yeah there is one there take uh number
four
hurry
up so uh you mentioned a lot of names I
uh I could go to you know ask you about
gff's involvement in this cley's
involvement in it uh I work with Dr
Stanley kryner if you know the name do
you know Stanley uh Stan's a 89y old uh
uh ESP doctor he's been doing the uh but
uh the question I might ask you is uh
without going because a lot of rabbit
holes is uh John Lily is an interesting
character right and uh could you talk
about John Lily's involvement in uh
Behavior manipulation and things like
that and also his uh metaphysical
aspects where he was doing sort of uh
UFO research or hyperdimensional
research so John Lily if you have any uh
anything to mention thanks so I mean
there was a whole lot of this stuff
going on at that time and John Lily was
certainly a part of this world um I I'm
I'm think I'm going to actually declined
to go down that rabbit hole there's so
many different rabbit holes we could go
down here and they're all so kind of
interesting and are you wearing a
psychic TV
t-shirt Genesis was my brother-in-law
we'll talk about
it Easter egg right is there another
question there number one sorry I didn't
see
you going back to your talk in uh 10
years ago yeah
um you said that you wouldn't go down
the road of talking about the problems
that could um when you uh went a little
bit too far or too close to yeah uh is
there anything you could or would talk
if I might ask so
boldly well I I so 10 years ago I had um
I published a book called blank spots on
the map that was about
investigating uh black sites for lack of
a better word kind of like secret places
advanced technology programs that sort
of thing and that's
very difficult to do from an
epistemological standpoint because what
happens is you start encountering this
world of kind of like Rick dooty
[ __ ] psychological
manipulations um disinformation cover
stories what have you and there's a huge
amount
of intellectual discipline that you need
to bring to that work as well as
research discipline in order to try to
prevent yourself from kind of getting
sucked into to some of
these stories that are difficult to
verify and where you feel like you're
being
manipulated and so at that time I would
just kind of stop and would say I'm not
going to go here this is getting into
places where I can't verify that I don't
feel comfortable you know uh studying
from an empirical standpoint and so the
the subject of this talk is in a way
perhaps a kind of negative image of that
talk where the object of study I guess
for lack of a better word here is that
phenomena of disinformation of uh
perceptual manipulation and that sort of
thing going to ask the room to be a
little bit more quiet we still have some
questions to solve about how to get
[ __ ] there is number one here in front
of me yeah thank you for the talk um do
you have any tips or is there any
research uh in regards to resilience or
recovery on that
yeah yeah so there is there is research
that's being done on it and it's tricky
um the research that I know about also
started back in the days of the Korean
War and they were afraid of again
soldiers defecting or um getting kind of
caught up in uh you know propaganda
operations and that sort of thing and
they started a strategy of what they
called pre-b buunk and the idea was that
by exposing you to the kinds of
propaganda that you were going to be
expected to be exposed to that you could
sort of inoculate yourself there be sort
of vaccine against that and I know
people are trying to take that approach
now and it does seem there is a kind of
theory that that that to a certain
extent you can inoculate yourself
against certain kinds of things but you
have to be exposed to that material
before you get exposed to this kind of
rabbit holy material and I think that
there's limits to that um and my
intuition about that is based on the
work of people like John milholland um
and some of the things that I talked
about in this talk
where I'm not sure the extent to which
you can use your capacity for reason to
override your um emotional responses or
um your kind of the parts of your brain
that want to make sense of patterns and
things like that so it's a really good
question there some certainly work is
being done on that thank you very much
uh in between actually I'm going to go
for Signal question there there is as
well something that they ask me like
people let's take care about the picture
policy so not to take pictures of
people that that's related to our how to
be
[ __ ] that's a start clear you uh
signal angel you have a question from
outer space yeah the internet is asking
few questions about the game are you
planning to open source it will there be
a tab completion and what's a good game
or what's a good way for people to play
together if they're not here yes a good
way for people to play together with
they're not here is to self-organize and
talk to each other on the internet the
game is accessible from the internet
right now you go to the the website that
I mentioned
Cyclops you use the enrollment code 37
C3 and you you can get going and playing
um there are very rudimentary ways to
communicate with other people inside the
game but I suggest just using those
rudimentary communication tools to
create um other channels with which to
communicate people um I as I said in the
slide as well if you are if you get the
furthest in the game or you're able even
to win the game and you're not here in
person um we you need to find somebody
who's physically present in order to
collect uh the prizes if you win them
well uh number
two hello thanks for the talk uh why
2016 what did
happen what's the what could have
possibly what's the indicator
201 what is well a lot happened in 2016
obviously um you know you're you you you
kind of pick a date you know you history
is not uh you know quantitative in that
kind of way and so you with a lot of the
with a date like that you kind of you
just try to identify a kind of
inflection point and in 2016 seems a
like a pretty uh pretty compelling
one 2016 yeah uh well you're 10 years
ago you were here well 2016 was not was
a little bit closer than that I was back
here in I think the last time I was here
was in
2013 yeah um h no what was in Berlin was
it in Berlin I don't know I don't know
can't remember amb that was here it was
here yeah that was the year when was
Snowden year oh yeah yeah um can I go to
number one we still have some time for
questions hi I really love your talk um
I'm usually really terrible at asking
questions so please bear with me I'm
terrible at answering them we're all
good so uh what got me really interested
in this talk was actually the title and
the description of it and I'm probably
not the only one and my question is is
regarding that really it bore really
close resemblance to what people
describe online as kitso posting
especially like no periods no sentencing
all caps was that the intention behind
it
and really was the your intention also
being getting the big turnout you got oh
I I well in the in the form of the talk
I'm I'm throwing a lot of material at
you a lot of images and things like that
that there is a part of the talk where
I'm sort of trying to perform a little
bit the thing that I'm also talking
about and that my my background is in
art and we always try to think about
form and content as being kind of the
same thing and so I'm trying to do a
little bit of that but I'm still trying
to do something that's intelligible but
also a little bit not intelligible you
thank you thank you number
two hello thank you for this very
disturbing however still entertaining
talk uh scops capitalism quite
accurately describes the current
hellhole of like this version of the
simulation if you will um I was
wondering if you have a take on this
Summer's UFO talks in Congress and if
this is part of the greater scop or what
do you think's going on there thank you
yeah that's a complicated topic so you
may have gotten the impression from my
talk that I like I think all UFOs is all
[ __ ] and d d like I actually don't
think that I'm I'm I'm making a much
smaller claim was regardless of whether
UFOs are real or not we know that
they've been used in scops all the time
um I have comp I I don't know I'm
very confused and at the same time it is
a subject that is confusing and where
does that confusion come from we don't
we know some places where it comes from
but there might be other places of it of
it that we don't know so to me it it is
is an interesting thing
to
study because you there's so many
different ways to try to get at it and
and none of them really
work um so in terms of of the
events over the
summer I am quite confident that that
David grush is not lying when he says
that there's a bunch of people in the
who told him that there was UFOs in this
hanger like I I don't think he's lying I
also know that in the military as well
this meme is all over the I grew up in
the military and you're on a base and
you're like what's happening over in
that hanger like oh that's where we keep
the UFOs right so there's a lot of
different things that can be true at the
same time and I guess what's interesting
to me about it is this conundrum that
is that is such a
powerful prompt to the
imaginal but that is also incredibly
difficult to try to research now when
you look at the aftermath of of of that
you know event things like the Schumer
Amendment which has recently sort of
been gutted the topic also pokes a lot
of hornets nests in the National
Security State particularly in parts
that you are developing like classified
Technologies and those are parts of the
state that do not want to be poked and
so it's interesting to see what some of
those responses are as well regardless
of whether UFOs are real or
[Music]
not