Answer 0 → Not aware (of Hank and/or the recent scandal)
Answer 1 → Upset at Hank for hiding his use of AI & lying to his audience
Answer 2 → Upset at Hank’s audience for their irrational reaction to his use of AI

A calibrating question I pair this with is “have you heard of the Morocco/Spanish migrants thing? If so, what caused this sudden wave of migrants?”3

EDIT: the follow up question here to deduce the shape of their network is to ask them if everyone they know is on the same side as them of this line.

Greenwich Line

In geographic maps, we have an arbitrary line we use as a reference to communicate our location on earth - a line that passes through the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London. We can do a similar thing here in the noosphere. We need to pick:

1. A big enough broadcasting source that reaches everywhere we want to measure

2. A payload that produces different results in each distinct territory that receives it

This most recent Hank Green story is a good organic example because it has fully saturated many of the territories we monitor, while remaining absent in others. This “full saturation” is a rare glimpse of the boundaries of information networks, because it creates a binary question that lets you check whether someone is in one of these territories or not.

This is the information equivalent of the medical test where you swallow a liquid that lights up in the x-rays.

Since this one originated in territory that we monitor4, we managed to catch the origin of it5, and could watch how the narrative mutates as it propagates. The summary of the true origin is as follows:

- he said an unscripted line that sounded like AI voice “I appreciate the pushback”
- people asked "Hank is it true, did you use AI here?"
- and he answered honestly "no but I did use AI in other parts of the production, like when searching for things to bring up sources"
- Audience: "WTF, why do you use AI at all??"
- Hank: "ok look, I see you're freaking out, and telling you the truth isn't working, so let me publicly concede fault so that we can compromise here"

Source: DefenderOfBasic on twitter

His “admission of fault” here, when propagated to networks outside of his audience, transformed into an admission that “the whole script was generated by AI”. Other parts of his apology were grabbed as sound bites and similarly mutated.

Now the goal of the upcoming event September 4th (online & in-person) is to have as many people as possible get this “inside view” - watching a piece of true information that you know firsthand mutate as it travels. This lets you see for yourself the delta between narrative & truth, and how this can be engineered & exploited.

Measuring people by this “Hank Greenwich Line” allows you to predict their response to future events that originate from the same area - will they hear the truth, a distorted version, or not hear it at all?

Upcoming Psyops Hackathon

If this Hank Green narrative was propagating during the September 4-6 weekend, it would be a prime target for a team participating in the event to perform an “open source psyop”6. Since the truth is already distorted in various parts of the internet, it’s fair game to operate on this & attempt to supplant it with another narrative that’s closer to the truth. Alternatively, you can try to identify parts that have not yet been infected, and attempt to inoculate them (usually the first framing people hear sticks - if you can get ahead of the propagation wave you can neutralize it).

In general, we distinguish what is a “legal move” by the final end result:

1. Are the targets closer to object level truth or further away from it?

2. Are the targets’ epistemics better or worse off as a result of this operation?

If you are going to create a distortion of the truth, you should have a plan for “unveiling” it as a psyop at the end to all affected so that they have (1) the object level truth of the matter, and (2) patch their epistemics to avoid falling for this kind of trick again.

Otherwise your operation is simply “untying” a knot that was already created organically or artificially.

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Q&A

From on whether journalists should count as “lighthouses”:

Wild to think about how 99% of our cities are dark matter. I know almost nothing of what is actually happening. Isn’t it the job of local newspapers to shed light on local issues? Journalism is so broken that citizens have to step up and become citizen journalists to make their voices heard

Source

There are two main missing things with journalism as it exists:

1. Trust

2. Objectivity

There are many trustworthy, high integrity journalists, but those that are distorting the truth mimic them, so we can’t tell them apart. The value of finding a “Lighthouse” is that they open up that information territory for you to see for yourself. You can rely on journalists most of the time while still having the option to check for yourself when you need to.

For the second part, objectivity is impossible when reporting on these narratives. You have to decide whether to accurately report on the propagating belief (thus helping it propagate) or counter it. This is a decision best made by each network for itself (via the local Lighthouse operator).

From (paraphrased)

Do you have advice for talking to people about psyops who otherwise dismiss it as “conspiracy thinking” ?

It is easy to open the door to unchecked paranoia & rejecting everything (or accepting everything). The way we stay grounded here is to focus on monitoring change, regardless of theories of its origin. Many people have suddenly updated their opinions overnight about Hank Green, this is a real, observable change. You always have access to observe changes in your own mind, and your community’s minds.

We avoid calling something “a psyop” as a way to discredit it7. Even knowing for a fact that something is an engineered campaign isn’t enough - the information could still be true. The only way to know for sure is to have seen it “from the inside”, seen who or what triggered it. Otherwise all we can do is study the change, attempt to change it back, and if we can encounter “unnatural resistance” we can begin to trace it to the origin of where that resistance may be coming from.

In Hank Green’s case, attempting to fix the narrative encounters resistance from the larger anti AI headwinds, which is a particularly strong force in the noosphere today.

joked that the broadcast the next morning after the event might look like1:

In this corner of the internet, we take very seriously the potential risks of engineered information campaigns having unexpected & dangerous consequences. An example of this danger was shared this week by sociologist & professor at University of California Richard M. Carpiano. The article claims a direct link between the death of a child to a specific lighthouse in the information ecosystem Children’s Health Defense2:

We call this an Infohazard3. As opposed to an “infoblessing”, which is information that improves your life upon contact with it. This week’s example of an infoblessing comes from , it’s called “growing the good vs fixing the bad”4.

The guard rails we have in place for September is getting social engineering companies & intelligence agencies actively monitoring what we’re doing. These are the people that have experience launching these things & disrupting engineered narratives (or organic information propagation) “in the wild”. We’re working on having a hotline to these organizations, and currently establishing ourselves as the public hotline that anyone can use to report a psyop/infohazard for intervention.

Examples of companies we would like to have “referee” or monitor here:

• Social Engineer LLC. They are famous for authoring the “original social engineering book” in 2011, and have been an annual fixture at DEFCON. They are firmly a lighthouse in social engineering in corporate settings

• Leverage Research’s, who study & formalize “deterministic belief change” whose work can anchor how we link cause & effect for information campaigns

• Intelligence Agencies like Graphika, Palantir, and Black Cube5

If you see a psyop, say “a psyop!”

The most important takeaway from today's report is that not all psyops are bad. What you should report is any change in your world that you are interested in intervening in (either because it’s good & you want more of it, or it’s bad and you want to slow its propagation). The type of changes we’re looking for are “permanent” changes to collective belief of a territory6.

The other important thing to understand is that awareness of a psyop is typically NOT sufficient to counter its effects. This is similar to how lawyers using bad rhetoric may have an “objection sustained” by the judge, and their question struck from the record, but the conclusion they put into the minds of the jury still lingers. It can only be “undone” by adding extra information to neutralize it (hence: fluoride in the water).

Next week we’ll share an example of a psyop we identified in Egypt, spread by the government through the mosques, that we deemed “a good, prosocial psyop” (its intended effect was increasing literacy rates). Documenting this good psyop would potentially break it, so we’ll discuss how to document cases like this without having undesired side effects.

A final note here is that identification of a psyop is a concrete, empirical thing, not a conspiracy theory. For example: many people believe the Graham Platner story that lead to him resigning from his political campaign was an engineered narrative. The proof we’re looking for is finding the people who conducted the campaign and seeing how they did it. We have such a case for the Justin Baldoni psyop of 2025 that the NYT reported on, where they revealed the backstage process:

Well, for instance, one PR person texts Melissa, “the narrative online is so freaking good and fans are still sticking up for Justin. You did such amazing work”.

She writes and Nathan replies, “narrative is crazy good. The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don’t even agree with half of them. LOL.”

From: New York Times is Trying to Explain Psyops (2025)

For us this means getting a report from a lighthouse in that territory who can reveal that “backstage” record.

State of the September Event

The September Event in Austin TX is still looking for people to apply to attend & contribute!

https://luma.com/psyop-hackathon

The current status is that it’s an “empty warehouse party”. We have Distribution Hall booked and are looking for sponsors right now to commit money to covering things like (1) high speed internet for livestreaming (2) flights & hotels of attendees & volunteers that can’t make it otherwise (3) potentially food & catering (4) most importantly, chairs, tables, & other furniture.

If we don’t get additional sponsors it will be more of a “burning man DIY / BYO” kind of event where we use this space as the HQ for the global monitoring & influence hackathon, and other sites around the country & the world can participate by hosting in-person gatherings on that same weekend (similar to the Global Game Jam).

One new thing we have this week is work-in-progress tooling that Walter has created for fingerprinting linguistic change in communities that opt in to self-monitoring. It looks like a Discord bot you can add to your community that will identify (1) words unique to your collective, and (2) report changes. Here’s a WIP:

This is a continuation of our work from 2025 where we rolled out self-monitoring tools that can detect the sudden changes of language and trace their origin to specific users in the network. Here for example is the graph of the introduction of the word “psyop” for the internet community known as “tpot”:

The idea is by September 4th we’ll have a few “monitoring stations” in enough discords and internet communities, that when a word or idea suddenly starts propagating, we’ll ping the lighthouses and be able to trace its movement across society (if not in real-time, then at least retroactively as we debate whether the change was good or bad).

This will only work if enough people (1) consciously choose to self monitor and report changes in their networks (2) understand the implications of exposing their communities this way & can share as little as needed to help the global network without making themselves vulnerable to hostile surveillance & hostile intervention.

We see a strong parallel between social engineering of the idea landscape, and geoengineering of the physical landscape — no one should be able to terraform the ground you live on without at minimum your awareness, and ideally participation.

At this stage we are inviting everyone who maintains a “psyops watch tower” to participate in this project. We’re calling these “Lighthouses”.

We envision every territory maintaining a Lighthouse that:

1. Monitors their own social fabric,

2. defends against foreign influence & organic drift,

3. conducts internal operations for their own self determined flourishing, and

4. handles requests from other lighthouses.

How to get your Lighthouse recognized

There is no central authority that endorses this. A Lighthouse becomes recognized once it lights up a territory in the noosphere2 sufficiently enough for outsiders to navigate it for themselves.

The proof is that when something emerges from that area & becomes known worldwide, their Lighthouse should be able to show it coming ahead of time.

Some news organizations & journalists function as Lighthouses, if they aren’t just broadcasting what they see in the territories they monitor, but also maintain a doorway3.

How to measure coverage

Just like the real physical landscape, there is infinite detail in the idea landscape. How many lighthouses do we need to have full coverage?

The goal is to find the minimum amount of lighthouses that cover all relevant territory. We calculate this from the perspective of wherever you are standing:

1. Begin by noticing a significant change in your world (good or bad)

2. Try and trace the origin of that change - is it in territory that’s already mapped?

We do this until every change comes from a known origin (either within your own territory, or another Lighthouse shows you where it came from).

For example, here in Ithaca NY, a recent change to my physical environment are these “NO DATA CENTER” signs on homes & businesses. What triggered this change?

The biggest local Lighthouse here is the r/ithaca subreddit. This is where I would go to ask this question if I needed to know. There are smaller Lighthouses for each social bubble here. To monitor as much of the social territory here with as few Lighthouses as possible, I would probably take (1) the subreddit (2) a few of the major Ithaca Facebook groups (3) the Cornell & Ithaca College bubbles4 (4) one or two physical bulletin boards in town.

Next up

If you are a Lighthouse operator, or can reach one, please comment below or sign up for the September Event here: https://luma.com/psyop-hackathon.

Next week we hope to have a list of some of the Lighthouse operators we have, including “proof” (standardizing on a way to share a sample of what they’re seeing in their territories, and instructions on how to look for yourself). We’ll also discuss how to mitigate the danger of making communities legible like this, and how to build this global network without overwhelming small territories with too much attention.

Other news:

• We have a proposal for a “Psyop Policy” that all social engineers/operators could adopt a version of, like a privacy policy but for social engineering.

• Katt is playtesting elements of the September Game at the July propaganda residency she’s at in San Francisco this month.

• We have a case study of “transparent social engineering”, thank you to Anomie from the discord for sharing this:

It somewhat perhaps in a slightly unrelated way reminded me of this: https://www.wordsfromeliza.com/p/fake-fans (Chaotic Good Projects), a music marketing agency who admitted to influence ops and narrative campaigns in public, until it reached a broader mass audience after which they scrubbed it all away :D interesting story