#1 - Can you name your Lighthouse?
Welcome to The Psyop Report! This is the official newsletter for the September 4-6 event, or “international psyop awareness day” as some have been calling it. Our goal is to teach people how to become a Live Player in their information environment - or at least how to avoid being a Useful Idiot1.
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:
Monitors their own social fabric,
defends against foreign influence & organic drift,
conducts internal operations for their own self determined flourishing, and
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:
Begin by noticing a significant change in your world (good or bad)
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
These are technical terms that we define as:
Useful Idiot - a mind that serves a purpose that it is not aware of, and that is typically against its own interests.
Live Player - a mind that triggers change relative to a specific game.
Example: we consider Hank Green to be a live player in the American liberal territory because he triggers intentional changes to that belief landscape. A journalist who has a bigger audience but does not originate decisions that ripple out into belief change is NOT a live player.
A politician who has great decision making power, but is NOT actively shaping beliefs of the populace is also not a live player in this social engineering game.
See full glossary here.
Noosphere - the geographic space formed out of humanity’s collective thoughts. Memes, ideologies, and religions live in this space. A full mapping would reveal the shifting tectonic plates (religions or collective beliefs growing and dying).
To put it more simply, if you see a news headline that says “scientists declare a crisis in astrophysics”, and you know how to find the relevant academics that are having that discussion on Twitter, Bluesky, etc, then we say this territory is “well lit”.
The news headline is what is pushed into the collective psyche, and looking at the original territory shows the history of how it got there. The propagation from origin to mainstream is “clean” / organic.
Note that passive observation cannot prove that a propagation path is organic. You must be able to read-write to the territory, not just read-only, in order to test for this.
Cornell University is its own vast territory with global reach, and lots of territories inside. That bubble’s interaction with the local townsfolk is rich with evolving social dynamics. I do not have a specific Lighthouse for Cornell, but have many different entry points to it. And it does have its own /r/Cornell subreddit.