#3 - Hank Greenwich Line

This week the question I’m asking to geolocate people in the noosphere¹ is: Have you heard of the Hank Green AI scandal?²

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.

Source: Cleveland Clinic

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.

Q&A

From Trang 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).

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From Aleks Jakulin (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.

1. Recall from our glossary that the noosphere is “the space that humanity’s persistent ideas & beliefs live in”. For example: when we talk about something like Islam growing, shrinking, or splitting, we recognize that this happens inside a space with “limited real-estate”. This is the finite space of human minds, attention, and mindshare. Christianity and Islam fight over finite territory in the same way the American right wing & left wing fight over finite territory.

Geolocating someone in this space means identifying what information network(s) they pay attention to & their range of influence (who trusts them).

2. See (August 1) “YouTuber Hank Green Is Facing a Fan Revolt Over His AI Use”

3. From Democracy Now (August 3) “Why Did 60,000 Migrants Cross from Morocco into Spain’s Ceuta?” (their answer is “a mix of factors, unknown”)

From CNN (August 1) https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-intl

Sánchez previously said the mass crossings constituted a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity” and blamed the influx on misinformation spread by people traffickers following the Supreme Court ruling.

In twitter right spaces the concept of “Sea Peoples” (wikipedia) is coming up in reaction to this story.

4. We now have a page for “territories we monitor”, see:

5. His initial response to his audience July 31 is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nerdfighters/comments/1vbmoj5/comment/p0vzmog/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

6. For those participating online - we will recognize and reward “reports” like this even if you aren’t conducting an operation yourself. Catching the origin of something that blows up into a mainstream story is very valuable, and if it’s reported early, gives the teams of operators a chance to alter the trajectory of the evolving narrative.

7. I appreciated this sentiment echoed last week by Defense Entrepreneurs Forum:

A high probability of something being a psyop doesn’t mean “I was right,” it means “I need to verify this information before I let it affect me.

Source: Are you in a PsyOp?